Glossary: frameworks, methods, governance, and interoperability

Framework and method

A Framework is a structure for content or process that serves as a tool to organize thinking and ensure consistency and completeness. A Method is a defined, repeatable approach to a particular type of problem. An Architecture Framework is a conceptual structure that helps plan, develop, implement, govern, and sustain an architecture.

The Architecture Development Method (ADM) is the core of the TOGAF framework: an iterative, multi-phase approach to develop and use an Enterprise Architecture that shapes and governs business transformation. It is therefore a method within a framework.

Remembering this nesting helps in the exam: TOGAF is an Architecture Framework, the ADM is its central Method, and techniques and content complete the frame. A modeling language such as ArchiMate is neither; it can, however, be used with both to represent the models produced during the ADM.

Three kinds of governance

Governance, in the general sense, is the discipline that monitors and steers the management of a business, or of an IS/IT landscape, in order to obtain the expected business outcomes. The standard derives two forms from it: one focused on architecture, the other on the business.

• Architecture Governance: monitoring and directing architecture-related work to obtain the desired outcomes and respect principles, standards, and roadmaps.
• Business Governance: ensuring that business processes and policies produce the expected outcomes and respect applicable regulation.

Services and information exchange

Interoperability has three complementary definitions: the ability to share information and services; the ability of systems or components to exchange information and use it; and the ability of systems to provide and receive services so as to work effectively together.

Service Orientation means looking at an enterprise, system, or building block through the services it provides and consumes. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an Architectural Style supporting that orientation, a style being a set of principles and characteristics that steer or constrain the shape of an architecture. Boundaryless Information Flow, a trademark of The Open Group, sums up a desired state: access to integrated information supporting business process improvement.