The ArchiMate Language

Enterprise Architect provides a highly compliant implementation of the ArchiMate standard, allowing Enterprise Architects and others to create rigorous and expressive models of enterprise architecture concerns, from the level of stakeholders and their interests right down to the virtual or physical devices that ultimately provide the computational power to run the enterprise and deliver valued services and outcomes to customers.

The language is deliberately pragmatic and has as a design consideration the need for the syntax and symbols to be compact and succinct, but at the same time provide the expressive power to capture and communicate structural and behavioral aspects of the model. The Enterprise Architect platform, with WebEA and Prolaborate, allows teams to create visualizations curated for any stakeholder group, from senior executives down to implementation staff.

Figure: Showing the relationship between ArchiMate and other modeling languages.

Enterprise Architect implements a large number of other standards, and models produced by other teams can be connected to the Enterprise Architecture models described with ArchiMate, thus creating a tapestry of interwoven threads. For example, ArchiMate deliberately takes a birds-eye view of process models, leaving out much of the details and concentrating on conveying the value and how it relates to Business Functions and Services, Roles and Actors. These models can be connected to more detailed models described the use of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). The same is true with respect to application models that, in ArchiMate, are quite high level and intentionally leave out implementation details such as protocols, ports and message flow. These latter details can be modeled using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and again connected to the ArchiMate Application Components to create expressive models allowing drill-down and drill-up from any modeling context.

Figure: The relationship created between an ArchiMate application component and a UML component