Archimate and TOGAF 9’s EA Meta model

I’ve been using Archimate since 2004 after coming across it in the Netherlands. It fills a gap in the discipline of Enterprise Architecture by providing a well thought out EA meta model that supports modelling at an enterprise level and integrates well with SOA, BPMN, UML modelling at a solution level. When I’ve explained Archimate to my clients, it has been widely seen as making a lot of good sense and easily understandable. Early EA efforts have often been no more than Enterprise IT Architecture that leaves out the Business Architecture and frequently also the Information/Data Architecture domains. Archimate unified all the architecture domains very well. It is good that Archimate has now been adopted by the Open Group. It was a shame that it wasn’t adopted for TOGAF 9 but should be more influential in TOGAF 9.1 and I expect it to become the defacto global EA modelling language standard by then. TOGAF 9 has now an EA meta model but it has some gaps and awkwardnesses that full adoption of Archimate should address. One area that I’d like to see Archimate be extended is integration with the Business Motivation Model (BMM). the TOGAF 9 EA meta model already has some concepts from BMM, but lacks the clarity and quality of Archimate.