This category contains material that covers the usage, selection, adoption and integration of EA frameworks and methods; as well as information about the role of standards in EA.

Survey Finds Enterprise Architecture Teams in North America Are Slow To Adopt TOGAF: TOGAF’s Effectiveness in Question

Cincinnati, OH – October 20, 2008: EAdirections released findings regarding the effectiveness of TOGAF in North America. The findings were based on survey data collected from 135 points of participation in an EAdirections webinar entitled “Putting the ‘E’ in TOGAF”. The webinar was presented in September2008 in conjunction with IIR, the sponsor of the Enterprise Architectures Conference. The webinar analyzed challenges in applying TOGAF to enterprise-wide architecture efforts and made specific recommendations on strategies that can make TOGAF, or any other EA framework more effective at an enterprise level.

The participants were almost entirely North American with 95.6% of the attendees from the U.S. or Canada. The vast majority were large private sector organizations, including companies from the financial services, aerospace, telecommunications, manufacturing, energy, and various manufacturing industries. In addition, there were attendees from the public sector and higher education.

Larry R. DeBoever, a Managing Director of EAdirections commented “We were surprised at the number of companies that joined the webinar which indicates the interest in this issue. While TOGAF is rich in content, our experience mentoring clients to increase their effectiveness has led us to the conclusion that TOGAF does not provide adequate guidance on analyzing and presenting an enterprise view, linking EA to overall business strategy, addressing issues of culture and politics, sequencing and prioritizing EA tasks, or communicating EA deliverables to leadership.”

“We surveyed the webinar participants at the beginning of the webinar to get a better understanding of their experience with TOGAF,” said George S. Paras, a Managing Director of EAdirections. “We didn’t expect the results to be as insightful as they were.”

Finding #1: The majority of organizations in North America do not use TOGAF. Among those that do use TOGAF, only 16.4% use TOGAF as their primary enterprise architecture (EA) framework. Almost two-thirds of those that report they use TOGAF (65.6%) use it as a reference tool.

Less than half of the participants, 45.2%, report that they use TOGAF in any form. Among those who report they use TOGAF:

Finding #2: Only 11.1% of TOGAF users described TOGAF as “very effective” for solution architecture efforts. The remainder described TOGAF as “somewhat effective” or “mostly ineffective” for solution architecture.

“This finding was very surprising,” said Tim Westbrock, a Managing Director of EA of EAdirections. “Frankly, we feel that TOGAF’s strengths are in solution architecture where there are clearly articulated, bounded requirements. I think what these results may indicate are the challenges leveraging TOGAF as it is a very complex document and the sections do not always link well to each other.”

Finding #3: Only 6.7% of TOGAF users described TOGAF as “very effective” for enterprise-wide architecture efforts. The remainder described TOGAF as “somewhat effective” or “mostly ineffective” enterprise-wide architecture.

“This finding is at the core of why we held the webinar and our experience working with clients,” said Mr. DeBoever. “Despite TOGAF’s comprehensiveness and great reference models, there is very little guidance on how EA teams should approach the top-down, business strategy-driven, holistic, unbounded issues that exist at an enterprise level.”

Finding #4: It appears that, among webinar participants, the more a firm relies on TOGAF, the more likely they are to evaluate TOGAF as “effective”. The opposite also appears to be true.

“TOGAF is an important contribution to enterprise architecture,” said Mr. Westbrock. “We expect that The Open Group will continue to extend and expand TOGAF’s content well beyond the upcoming release of version 9.0. Hopefully, they will address some of these issues we have been talking about in our role as ‘loyal opposition’.”

A podcast of the webinar, copies of the presentation and answers to participant questions can be accessed in our Webinars, Podcasts, and Presentations section.

EA Frameworks

EA Frameworks, made popular first by John Zachman, and since by many different EA framework creators, tool vendors and practitioners, appear to be a very polarizing phenomenon. There are many devotees to a particular framework; others who are certain you must have one, but not sure which one to pick or how to use one they have chosen; others who could take them or leave them; with still a few who would tell you they are a big waste of time. This article is going to provide you with a way to understand and make decisions about EA Frameworks.

(This article contains an addendum with links to all of the major EA frameworks, as well as some of the lesser known and more specialized EA frameworks.)