TOGAF 9

I am sure that anyone in the architecture space has seen the arrival of the new iteration of The Open Groups Architecture Framework, which landed recently. The much awaited new appearance of the widely used framework as been worked on for quite a period! The new iteration has had a considerable amount of contribution from Capgemini who have introduced an enhance Content Framework, there has been a degree of debate about what this means as a response to a blog from Ron Tolido. I was at the BCS Enterprise Architecture (EA) Speciality Group (SG) at which I am not sure you will be surprise TOGAF 9 was a major topic of conversation (outside of the usual conversation of what is Enterprise Architecture anyway debate). During one of the coffee breaks I had an opportunity to catch up with Wayne Horkan CTO (UK & Ireland) of Sun Microsystems a BCS peer of mine and also an old work colleague. Which sparked some interesting conversation on what needs to happen in the EA Framework space, especially as we were at the BCS talking about the subject!

Wayne has a great blog which points you at a number of interesting evaluation of TOGAF 9 and also talks about a point (which was the topic of our conversation) about the introduction of more 'architecture' into the TOGAF Framework (In which I also get a mention, thanks Wayne!).

My personal perspective which I am sure will cover more than one post is that architecture frameworks need to get simpler not more complex. When Judith Jones showed me the new TOGAF 9 book and said that it was twice as thick as the old one, I must admit I thought it would propagate to an even greater degree the 'ivory tower' complex that engulfs many EA practices. One of the things we talked about at length during the BCS EA SG was that EA practitioners need to become more intricately involved in the Business and what it wants to do. One of the main ways of doing this is to talk their language, which means investing time effort and energy to understand what their aims and objectives are. I for one am all about a common language for architects. However we need one that is simple enough that when we speak with our business colleagues we do not blind them with pseudo science because whenever we do this we loose needed credibility.