I have been practicing enterprise architecture(EA) for a good while and have purchased many books looking for a better way to explain the value and methodology of EA. Especially important is how the use of a shared repository with agreed upon deliverables to document our EA process would help us in our work. I needed something ‘down to earth’, i.e. practical and I think this book really helped me in that regard.I found the practice scenarios in Chapter II extremely helpful in naming and describing the development of architecture documents along with their interface to the repository.Especially interesting to me was the connection made to User Stories. How to relate EA and its artifacts to the Agile methodology is not well understood and the identification of corresponding user stories was a real bonus.I bought the book looking for a way to improve the practice of EA at my firm and this book was really helpful to me and my colleagues with whom I shared it.The book is ‘practical’ as advertised and it did help me improve the day-to-day work that I do.

This is a superb, lively, easy to follow, step-by-step, and comprehensive introduction into the most relevant Archimate 3.1 concepts using Sparx Systems’ Enterprise Architect (“Sparx EA”) as the underlying repository-based modelling tool. It is targeted primarily towards novice or early-stage enterprise architects who may want to get kick-start or rejuvenate their enterprise architecture work practices; more seasoned architects will find the book helpful if they need to turn to Archimate for the first time or when revisiting or reusing the standard after some hiatus.I especially liked the no-nonsense, down-to-earth language of the authors who thereby manage to link the (somewhat lofty and theoretical, I am ready to admit) concepts of TOGAF and Archimate to real-world situations enterprise architects and their stakeholders undoubtedly will encounter. All of the theoretical architectural deliberations are immediately modelled in Sparx EA – so the readers will also get a very good practical introduction into this tool as a by-product of studying the examples.The effectiveness of their approach especially for not so experience enterprise architects lies in the fact that they use a common (simplified, but realistic!) example enterprise as the concrete backdrop against which they construct use cases and problems for the enterprise architect to address and to solve. This allows them to clearly explain and demystify many of the seemingly superficial concepts of Archimate such as capability, function, service, or node, by relating metamodel terms directly to their exemplar company setting. Furthermore, they also introduce the concept of so-called “focused metamodels” (for Archimate) where they choose the most relevant entities of the various Archimate layers (application, technology & physical, business layer including strategy & implementation) such as “application component”, “node”, “business service”, “node”, or “gap”) and diagrammatically depict the most important typical relations this entity possesses in the Archimate metamodel. This very nicely complements the approach of the Archimate standard’s own documentation which typically depicts many entities and their respective relations for a single layer.I have actually studied and used the original Archimate standard which really is not such a bad piece to read but, alas, it’s a standard and, as such, has to be precise and not enjoyable. But reading the exposition and explanations of this book it was (almost) entertaining to get to know the authors’ opinion on how to actually use the concepts in practice. In passing, they also give crucial pieces of modelling advice, for instance, that contrary to their common name, “microservices” have to be modelled as “application components” in Archimate and rather not as “application services”: They also make the reader understand the (important) difference between these two concepts.While the book certainly is also attractive to any reader interested in doing enterprise architecture with the Archimate 3.1 standard alone, its greatest strength lies in the swiftness with which it links its architectural and modelling advice to the Sparx EA tool. Besides an excellent, step-by-step introduction on how to use the (admittedly, really powerful) modelling tool (including all relevant screen shots), the book also touches often overlooked but extremely helpful concepts Sparx EA supports such as switching to the list view or matrix view of diagrams, hierarchically linking diagrams, using layering and filtering to manage diagram complexity, importing XLS files containing architecture-relevant artifacts and relationships, and generating reports and publishing models. Because enterprise architects continuously deal with “as-is”, “to-be”, and several transition architectures at the same time, a dedicated section on how to efficiently model this is in Sparx EA is very welcomed. All of the described diagrams can be (freely) downloaded from GitHub in the form of chapter-specific Sparx EA repositories – a nice additional service for the readers!In addition, the book contains many very helpful pieces of advice to novice or early-career architects such as fitting all diagrams on a single page or spitting the view, aligning similar artifacts for better readability, or using a “sandbox” branch of an architecture as a playground for testing and parallel architecture development – all well-established and proven practices for decades! The book deservedly will get a prominent spot right between my Archimate 3.1 standard and Lankhorst’s more academic “Enterprise Architecture at Work”.Finally, I am confident that readers of “Practical Model-Driven Enterprise Architecture” will be able to understand, use, and appreciate Archimate’s intricacies and broad applicability much better and much faster than just by trying and experimenting with this powerful enterprise architecture modeling standard and method alone.

Great Architecture book that delves into bridging actual implementation of an Architecture Framework and a Tool. There are many books on Architecture Frameworks, and there are many tool specific books, but very few that explain how to implement a framework in a tool.Mudar and Williams have taken the ArchiMate 3.1 Framework which can be easily transposed onto other modeling standards such as UML, TOGAF, BPMN and created a step by step process for implementing a repository. As most tools are fairly similar for modeling, I would recommend this book for those that are using other UML Modeling tools as well.Very well written as it takes a standard (ArchiMate) and shows how to implement using an imaginary shipping company. If you do not know ArchiMate, this book is a great introduction. If you do, this book is a very good implementation guide.Finally, one of the best parts of this book is the guides for implementing architectural frameworks in a repository. If you use another framework, and even another tool, the best practices in implementing a repository make this book valuable for starting up a new architectural repository (or optimizing one currently in use).

This is a superb, lively, easy to follow, step-by-step, and comprehensive introduction into the most relevant Archimate 3.1 concepts using Sparx Systems’ Enterprise Architect (“Sparx EA”) as the underlying repository-based modelling tool. It is targeted primarily towards novice or early-stage enterprise architects who may want to kick-start or rejuvenate their enterprise architecture work practices; more seasoned architects will find the book helpful if they need to turn to Archimate for the first time or when revisiting or reusing the standard after some hiatus.I especially liked the no-nonsense, down-to-earth language of the authors who thereby manage to link the (somewhat lofty and theoretical, I am ready to admit) concepts of TOGAF and Archimate to real-world situations enterprise architects and their stakeholders undoubtedly will encounter. All of the theoretical architectural deliberations are immediately modelled in Sparx EA – so the readers will also get a very good practical introduction into this tool as a by-product of studying the examples.The effectiveness of their approach especially for not so experience enterprise architects lies in the fact that they use a common (simplified, but realistic!) example enterprise as the concrete backdrop against which they construct use cases and problems for the enterprise architect to address and to solve. This allows them to clearly explain and demystify many of the seemingly superficial concepts of Archimate such as capability, function, service, or node, by relating metamodel terms directly to their exemplar company setting. Furthermore, they also introduce the concept of so-called “focused metamodels” (for Archimate) where they choose the most relevant entities of the various Archimate layers (application, technology & physical, business layer including strategy & implementation) such as “application component”, “node”, “business service”, “node”, or “gap”) and diagrammatically depict the most important typical relations this entity possesses in the Archimate metamodel. This very nicely complements the approach of the Archimate standard’s own documentation which typically depicts many entities and their respective relations for a single layer.I have actually studied and used the original Archimate standard which really is not such a bad piece to read but, alas, it’s a standard and, as such, has to be precise and not enjoyable. But reading the exposition and explanations of this book it was (almost) entertaining to get to know the authors’ opinion on how to actually use the concepts in practice. In passing, they also give crucial pieces of modelling advice, for instance, that contrary to their common name, “microservices” have to be modelled as “application components” in Archimate and rather not as “application services”: They also make the reader understand the (important) difference between these two concepts.While the book certainly is also attractive to any reader interested in doing enterprise architecture with the Archimate 3.1 standard alone, its greatest strength lies in the swiftness with which it links its architectural and modelling advice to the Sparx EA tool. Besides an excellent, step-by-step introduction on how to use the (admittedly, really powerful) modelling tool (including all relevant screen shots), the book also touches often overlooked but extremely helpful concepts Sparx EA supports such as switching to the list view or matrix view of diagrams, hierarchically linking diagrams, using layering and filtering to manage diagram complexity, importing XLS files containing architecture-relevant artifacts and relationships, and generating reports and publishing models. Because enterprise architects continuously deal with “as-is”, “to-be”, and several transition architectures at the same time, a dedicated section on how to efficiently model this is in Sparx EA is very welcomed. All of the described diagrams can be (freely) downloaded from GitHub in the form of chapter-specific Sparx EA repositories – a nice additional service for the readers!In addition, the book contains many very helpful pieces of advice to novice or early-career architects such as fitting all diagrams on a single page or spitting the view, aligning similar artifacts for better readability, or using a “sandbox” branch of an architecture as a playground for testing and parallel architecture development – all well-established and proven practices for decades! The book deservedly will get a prominent spot right between my Archimate 3.1 standard and Lankhorst’s more academic “Enterprise Architecture at Work”.Finally, I am confident that readers of “Practical Model-Driven Enterprise Architecture” will be able to understand, use, and appreciate Archimate’s intricacies and broad applicability much better and much faster than just by trying and experimenting with this powerful enterprise architecture modeling standard and method alone.

I've been in environments with failed EA practices, with struggling EA practices, with developing practices, and with none at all. Practical Model-Driven Enterprise Architecture is helpful in all of them.The "middle-out" organization of the book couples effectively with the increasing levels of detail as you build a metamodel of a business and gain the skills to implement a business model as an Enterprise Architect, a Solution Architect, or a Business Architect. Mudar's use of the Archimate standard provides a foundation to build on either with the tool he describes in the book or with other available, low-cost tools.If you're curious about how to implement an effective Enterprise Architecture, this book is an invaluable introduction and reference. Although it doesn't provide a guide for navigating the politics and organizational stresses of an EA implementation, its comprehensive explanation of models provides a valuable backdrop for architects implementing EA, rather than just talking about it.I bought the paperback format because I hang sticky notes off pages for easy reference, and the book's physicality forces me to take my hands off the keyboard and my brain off the minutiae. The sheer amount and interrelatedness of the reference material, though, begs for the Kindle edition.