There are few things which makes an organization unique. The way of describing the business is not one of them. That is why there are standards for documentation of Enterprise Architecture, or EA which is a common abbreviation. The problem is that there are so many standards - over 70 if you only count the biggest ones. Looking at the standards closer, we can see that they are mostly overlapping and sometimes actually consistent, but they have different goals and target audiences and most specifically different construction. So which one should we choose?
After working with EA in 20 years, we have realized that the smartest way is to combine the best things from the most extensive standards. Our choice briefly is:
- The meta objects and relations from ArchiMate, TOGAF and SKR/Inera
- The levels from Zachman
- The view types and symbols from ARIS/Scheer
- The innovation aspect from Osterwalder
Another point of view is that enterprise architecture sometimes could be unnecessarily complicated. It simply depends on which level of ambition you have in your EA work as well as which questions you want to find an answer for and with what amount of precision.
If you want to start easy, but at the same time you want to have the possibility to increase the level of ambition gradually, we'd recommend you to use Prime Arch Core. Prime Arch Core is a powerful simplification of Prime Arch in its full scope (Prime Arch Extended) and contains 29 meta objects compared to 114 meta objects in Prime Arch Extended.