What this book covers
Chapter 1, Enterprise Architecture and Its Practicality, starts by highlighting what made TOGAF® the de facto standard for implementing EA and puts the spotlight on the problems that most TOGAF® practitioners face – some (if not all) of which we are quite sure you will have faced. In this chapter, we will talk about the problems, the proposed solutions, and the tool that will be used for this purpose.
Chapter 2, Introducing the Practice Scenarios, introduces the three scenarios that will be used to make this book practical and connected to real-life examples. The company that we will talk about is a fictional company, which we will name ABC Trading, but it can represent any company that you have or will be working for. The purpose of the scenarios is to make up simple and generic stories that can fit within your real-life work environment, even if your organization is working in a different business domain. The scenarios will be detailed enough and as close as possible to problems that you have faced or will face as an EA.
Chapter 3, Kick-Starting Your Enterprise Architecture Repository, helps you create your first diagram instruction by instruction to get you familiar with Sparx. By doing so, you will be introduced to some techniques at different levels of expertise that you may find useful, even if you have used Sparx before.
Chapter 4, Maintaining Quality and Consistency in the Repository, helps you learn how to use the ArchiMate® 3.1 standard as a reference by putting it in a simple and easy-to-understand way. Therefore, architects contributing to the content of the repository will enjoy following the standard, which will be reflected in the quality and consistency of their artifacts.
Chapter 5, Advanced Application Architecture Modeling, helps you learn how to enrich the EA repository with additional artifacts from the application architecture layer. You will learn more advanced skills in Sparx and ArchiMate® to build an EA repository that can be trusted within your organization.
Chapter 6, Modeling in the Technology Layer, introduces you to the structural elements of the technology layer and how they are related to other layers. We will learn how to model technical, physical, and network environments. We will also learn different ways to represent technical constructs and how to move from more abstract to more concrete representations.
Chapter 7, Enterprise-Level Technology Architecture Models, introduces behavioral elements and how to use them. We will learn how to import information from other sources and model and organize technical services in order to answer enterprise-wide questions. We will generate our first report and analyze our findings.
Chapter 8, Business Architecture Models, helps you answer business questions, such as what a business provides to the world, how it achieves it, how an organization is structured, who is responsible for what, and how these business architecture elements are automated and realized by elements from the application and technology layers.
Chapter 9, Modeling Strategy and Implementation, helps you learn how to utilize the power of business capability models to identify the gaps between what we are capable of doing now and what we are targeting to do in the future. Once the gaps are defined, you will need to put a plan for bridging them within a timeline.
Chapter 10, Operating the EA Repository, helps you learn how to add formality and organization to the process of making changes to the enterprise repository. The more content you have and the more architects add and remove content to and from the repository, the more challenging it becomes to keep it organized and up to date.
Chapter 11, Publishing Model Content, helps you learn how to put diagrams and content that you have developed in the previous chapters into documents, presentations, or web pages that can be shared with other stakeholders who do not have experience with Sparx or a license to use it.
