In complex world of IT artifacts it is good to introduce a standarized and well built model of how to describe the important things. It will for sure help organizing information and keep track of changes. It is important in professional world to describe things in professional manner. So there is Enterprise Architecture with can be defined as

“conceptual blueprint that defines the structure and operation of organizations. The intent of enterprise architecture is to determine how an organization can effectively achieve its current and future objectives“

https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/enterprise-architecture

You could imagine what would happen if some organization do not practice enterprise architecture, but I would go a little further asking what would happend if organization model something but in unstructured way not enjoying things coming from a formal framework. You could easily end up with a mess and information chaos which will nagatively impact your business, technology and operations.

ArchiMate language

Although it is said that ArchiMate is a language, I say that it is more than a language because it has a characteristics of a framework. It provides us with several layers of modelling such as motivation, strategy, business, application, technology, implementation and migration. Each layer consists of several elements which can be then divedided into 3 groups such as active, behavioral and passive. In a result you get a matrix like structure of grouped elements which can be used in form of diagrams called ArchiMate views.

So, to recap. It is a language with bonuses. Constists of 6-ish concepts (layers) which then divides into 3 groups of various elements. Everything can be put on diagrams and views.

Modelling tools available

There are few tools that I would recommend when speaking about Enterprise Architecture and especially ArchiMate. I would say Sparx Enterprise Architect is the most complete one, but it requires some minor investments. The second one is Archi, which is open source tool. Both tools support collaborative work. Sparx EA by means of Pro Cloud Server, and Archi by using coArchi plugin with Git repository. For bigger projects with lots of people working on model and lots of things happening EA will be better for sure, but for solo projects Archi should do the work.

Repository setup

For those who work from different places and in team environment, having a repository will be huge benefit. It is not as flexible and dynamic as Miro for instance, but Enterprise Architecture is somehow more like a static thing than brainstorming sessions. So start with setting up a Git repository. I prefer using GitLab. Create group if needed and empty project. You are done for now.

Installation of Archi

Go to https://www.archimatetool.com/download/ and download the latest version of Archi. It is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. After download you either install or just unpack archive. Now go to https://www.archimatetool.com/plugins/ and download coArchi plugin as it is needed to enable collaboration feature using Git repository. Plugins can be installed from Archi by going to Help – Manage Plug-ins. Now you are good to go with relaunching Archi to enable collaboration plugin.

Model management

There are two scenarios with models management. You either start your own model locally and then publish it remotely or import someone else’s model into your blank project. I think it covers most of use cases. The first case is to create blank model and then select Collaboration – Add local model to workspace and publish. The second case is to Collaboration – Import remote model to workspace. If you do not create own project then in model-repository/project/.git Archi will create so-called temp file for your project. If you created project locally, then you can just open it by this way.

Changes with Git SCM

Team work requires basic knowledge of Git SCM as when you start you should pull changes from the server (Collaboration – refresh model). Once you’re done with your changes then Commit changes and finally Publish changes. As with any other Git repository you can switch to different branches, merge changes, ammend commits etc.

Sample project

To express ArchiMate visually I decided to select my next technology project/demo as a base for this model. It is NIS2 and its EDR, antivirus, antirootkit etc requirements which I will show on a hundreds of containers in a automated form of Ansible automation. So there are various layers concerning this project motivation as well as strategy and going further down with business, application, technology and finally implementation and motivation.

Please note that colors are important here as they group concepts.

Motivation

Source of the project itself is at EU legislator which places several NIS2 drivers and requirements which implies goals and outcomes. All of those can be easily mapped to strategy elements such as cource of action but also business processes. You can quick path down to the bottom for implementation plateau describing before and after state of architecture.

Strategy

Different viewers require different viewpoints so each view/diagram allows us to select particular interesing viewpoint for this very diagram. This way unrelated (directly) elements are blurred and you can clearly see only these elements coming directly from this concept. So strategy level describes high-level way of describing what we can do and with what means. I help myself with little addition of motivation requirement as well as technology process. Finally there is “coverage” requirement which can be defined as a result of this strategy but it could be also a value of stream if needed.

Business

We defined business layer for who does what, so there is Bob which is a automation engineed who creates automation processes. We put here also motivation elements, strategy elements, but also application elements which are not blurred becaues this is “business process cooperation” viewpoint and it contains also application elements such as “clamav” and “rkhunter” which in particular implements and realizes antivirus and antirootkit coverage respectively.

Application

It is really good to be able to apart from obvious application components and its functions to put also why we do this. Often people ask why we do something in technology, so such a convention to mix elements from various level of abstraction gives this answer to them.

Technology

Being a “technology usage” viewpoint I can both pick technology and application elements here as well as add some different elements like motivation ones. One new thing appears here which is grouping but in structure way not only a visual one. By placing things inside a group you will be asked about relation between group and its elements as it decreases amount of possibilites in terms of additional relation mixins. I think that technology layer is the at the bottom of artifacts tree logically, and the lower placed implementation & migration is not actually.

Implementation and migration

It is the most complete viewpoint as it contains business, application, technology, some of motivation and implementation elements. So here you defined what, in what form, possibly who and what is the final result. It is more like project plan. Feel free to add whatever you need to describe things in order to plan changes and what baseline will it refer to and will it change it to some new baseline.

Archi layout with Hints

Here you have a screen from Archi. Please note that you have “Hints” section so you can learn more about specifics of various viewspoints, concepts and elements as well as relationships between them.