TOGAF 10 documentation: standard, guides, and Library

What the TOGAF Standard is

TOGAF is an EA framework: a standard way to develop, approve, use, and maintain enterprise architectures. It rests on an iterative process model, on best practices, and on a set of reusable assets. As an open, industry-consensus standard of The Open Group, it applies to any kind of architecture in any context, which is why it is called a foundational framework.

Its Version 1, released in 1995, drew on TAFIM, a framework from the US Department of Defense. Since then The Open Group Architecture Forum has updated it at regular intervals to reflect stable, proven practice.

The Fundamental Content: six documents

The Fundamental Content gathers the universal concepts of EA. It comes as six free-standing yet closely linked documents, whose organization mirrors that of an architecture capability.

• Introduction and Core Concepts: overview, key concepts, and definitions
• Architecture Development Method: the iterative ADM
• ADM Techniques: techniques for applying the ADM (principles, gap analysis, risk…)
• Applying the ADM: adapting the ADM to the required architecture style
• Architecture Content: Content Framework, metamodel, building blocks, and deliverables
• Enterprise Architecture Capability and Governance: organization, skills, roles, and governance

Series Guides: making concepts operational

The TOGAF Series Guides are also part of the standard. They provide proven practice for more specific needs: value-oriented strategic decisions, Business Architecture, information and data management, security and risk, agility, the digital enterprise, or use alongside other standards such as ArchiMate, IT4IT, O-AA, or DPBoK.

The ADM document mostly says what may be done; the Series Guides explain how to do it. Not all are useful everywhere, but an architect deploying TOGAF should know they exist. They evolve faster than the Fundamental Content, thanks to continuous, incremental delivery by the Architecture Forum.

The TOGAF Library and the value of the split

Outside the standard, the TOGAF Library is a public portfolio of guidelines, templates, patterns, and other resources that speed up architecture creation. It directly feeds one class of information in the Architecture Repository: the Reference Library.

Splitting the standard into documents lets a specialty be explored on its own, lets one document change without touching the others, and lets some be adopted without the rest. A newcomer can start with the ADM and postpone the capability documents; an organization that already has a framework can combine it with selected parts of TOGAF.