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Over the past years, in the Enterprise Architecture (EA) business, some experts and organizations have developed a certain number of Frameworks to simplify the start of EA projects and give a general and stable scheme to plan their models.
Each Framework is built to fit the necessity of modeling a certain domain, either complex or simple. Such approach made the current high-quality Frameworks suffer some limitations:
- they are too general – mainly classification grids and they don’t have any specific analysis tools to describe problems (e.g.: Zachman)
- they are mainly guide lines; they show, in a very detailed way, how to achieve the company EA process, but they have to be integrated with other Frameworks, more oriented on a specific domain (e.g.: Togaf)
- they are much too specialized – they provide powerful intervention schemes (formalized by their inner meta–meta model UML2); they are very complex (because domain exhaustive) and reusable but only if taken together in specific circumstances (e.g.: Modaf).
Therefore the problem is how to adopt a partial components mix from the different Frameworks to meet the current specific situation. From each Framework we must take out only those parts that are useful to describe the current domain, with the due details. Such integration among different Frameworks components is very effective but not easy to realize.
It is necessary to be very careful in verifying that the components’ semantic is coherent in all the elements taken from the Frameworks. Once the standard references have been defined to realize the project, the architects of the EA Team adapt the standard to the specific project reality.
It means that some redundant standard elements will be deleted and some standard specificities will be added. Thanks to such planning, the company Enterprise Architecture meta model will be realized.
As for the methodology to be used, we believe that it has to be defined on the grounds of the project and discussed with the Customer.
Today, we are inspired by the FEAF – Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework of the American Federal Government – and by the MoDAF – Ministry of Defence Architecture Framework, issued by the British Ministry of Defence.
FEAF has been established to specifically fulfill the needs of a complex and widespread Public Administration; it was set up slightly before the year 2000 and therefore has gathered plenty of experience. It devises EA models for organizations split into Agencies and that require to be coordinated by a central body (federate and coordinated segments).
The Framework is easy to “shape” into the required dimensions and fully documented. Moreover, it implements an interesting concept of measuring the performances inside the model.
Modaf is a Framework meant to describe complex architectures such as the military ones. It covers “everything” that can articulate an EA project of big dimensions.
Most frequently, of course, if such a framework is adopted unreasonably, it ends up creating extremely complex and big models compared with their domain. That is the reason why it needs to be customized for each specific project.
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