I've Downloaded TOGAF, Now What? - Part 2
- Sanda Morar
In my previous post, I was talking about my presentation on TOGAF at The Open Group's conference in Glasgow. Continuing from where I left off...
In the course of the presentation, I covered
What TOGAF is? What TOGAF is not?
In the talk, I showed a magic table with some (debatable) "TOGAF is" and "TOGAF is not" points. For example, TOGAF is generic, but it is not prescriptive. TOGAF is process driven, but is not artefact driven.
TOGAF gives you some generic artefacts. But it is up to you to gather and decide which artefacts you need. How do you decide "what you need"? How do you know that "what you need" is "what it takes"?
One school of thought is that these decisions are very much influenced by your interpretation of the scope of work and interpretation of the TOGAF framework. Sort of a give and take attitude.
TOGAF is a set of conceptual tools, but it is not a tool. I leave it up to you to identify the "set of conceptual tools". But, let’s be clear here - you will need a tool to implement TOGAF. And yes, if everything else fails, you can use a text editor as your implementation tool.
TOGAF is "flexible", but it is not "ontology driven". Again, this is something I leave up to you to figure out.
I find that all the "TOGAF is not" mentions above (and there were more in the presentation) make TOGAF very beautiful and give a lot of freedom. You can invent (not reinvent the wheel), you can create, you can reuse. Every time you have a choice to embark on a different journey through TOGAF. There are really no limits in customising, modelling and extending TOGAF. And that approach means that you can apply TOGAF beyond known limits, and yes, get the expected benefits and results beyond the limits too..
In that context, you may want to check out the examples shown in the presentation about how to enlist support, how to customise ADM, what ADMN is and is not, how to create a meta model and what to do next.
Apart from the great sessions I attended at the conference, I also discovered some gems. As I am running late, I will only mention two of them to you:
• BIiZZ Design pocket Guide Enterprise Architecture - smashing life saving book
• ABACUS tool - I found this tool very simple to use and extremely useful in making the Architecture predictable
Comments
Can you tell us where we can get the "BIiZZ Design" book ?
thanks !
Posted by: David Marsh | June 11, 2008 8:22 AM
It should read "BiZZdesign", not "BliZZ Design". The book has been published by BiZZdesign. You can see it at their site (www.bizzdesign.nl). Look under "Academy" --> "Publications"
Posted by: Sanda Morar | June 11, 2008 9:51 AM