Archimate - The language of Architecture

One of the best kept secret of open group is Archimate – a language for architecture. Archimate is developed and maintained by Archimate forum, which is the part of the open group. It is surprising that even togaf9, the latest architecture standard release from open group, does not mention any thing about Archimate. One of the best ways to understand architecture domains is to go through the documentation available at http://www.archimate.org/ . According to ArchiMate, an enterprise has two aspects – structure and behavior. The structure elements are of two types – Active and passive. The example of active elements is – OU, Location, Role, Responsibilities). The example of passive elements are business objects like purchase order etc. Behavior elements are business activities performed by one or more roles in order to meet enterprise objective. While performing business activities, roles manipulate passive structure elements or business objects like purchase order etc.
Archimate defines three layer of architecture – Business, Information (appl and data) and technology or infrastructure. Enterprise architecture has basically three layers

The Business layer offers products and services to external customers, which are realised in the organization by business processes (performed by business actors or roles).
The Application layer supports the business layer with application services which are realised by (software) application components.
The Technology layer offers infrastructural services (e.g., processing, storage and communication services) needed to run applications, realised by computer and communication devices and system software .
Above layers are shown in following diagram

Relationship between layers can be seen from two perspectives. While upper layer uses the service of lower layer. On the other hand, the lower layer also realised the functionality of upper layer. For example a business object which belongs to business layer , may be realised by a data object belonging to data layer.

Each of the above layers has active structure element, behaviour element and passive structure element. Like business layers, application and technology layers has components which play roles and perform behaviour and manipulate passive elements like data objects. An architecture done on this line will have traceability across business, application and technology layer. Such traceability is the key to reducing complexity, managing change (Agility) and ensuring that IT services are aligned to real business need. Complexity, alignment and agility are three main reasons why EA is done.
It should be noted that is Archimate a business role is typically assigned to a business actor. Business actors may be individual persons (e.g. customers or employees), but also groups of people and resources that have a permanent (or at least long-term) status within the organizations. Business processes, which may be triggered by events and manipulate business objects, describe the business behavior of a role or many roles. The externally visible behavior of a business process is modeled by the concept of business service, which represents a unit of functionality that is meaningful from the point of view Of the environment. A business process will have a business interface using which a business role will interact with the business process. The example of architecture diagram made by using Archimate is given below

If you want to try Archimate, you can get Archimate stencil from http://www.archimate.org/en/start_using_archimate/ and start using Archimate for your architecture work. Please do let me know your experience with this Archimate.