Getting my head around Enterprise Architecture (specifically TOGAF)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 12 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

After many years designing and implementing technology infrastructure, I’ve been trying to move “up the stack” out of the (multiple) domain architect space, towards solutions architecture and onwards to develop as an enterprise architect. That involves a mindset change to progress from the role of a designer to that of an architect but I’m on my way… and I currently manage roadmaps, portfolios (standards) and reference architectures (amongst other duties), so it might be useful to know a bit about Enterprise Architecture…

I thought it might help to get certified in The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and I spent a week on a TOGAF 9 training course last year following which I received a voucher to sit the combined part 1 and 2 exam. At the time of writing I don’t know how successful I’ve been – in fact, this post is timed to go live at the moment when I’ll be sitting at a Prometric testing station, no doubt getting frustrated with a single monitor and limited screen resolution as I try to search a PDF of the TOGAF manual at the same time as answering questions… but, even so, I thought I’d share my revision experience for the benefit of others.

For reasons that I won’t go into here, there was a gap between my course and my exam voucher being released so I wasn’t able to take it whilst the content was still fresh in my mind. Several months later, I set aside a week to spend four days revising the content, and reading around the topic, before taking the exam at the end of the week but I found it hard to revise – my main strategy was to going over the course content again, along with a variety of other resources – all of which were highly textual (even the diagrams are unattractive) and, above all, excruciatingly dull.

I decided I needed some visual content – not just diagrams but some animated content describing key TOGAF concepts would have been fantastic. I didn’t find anything like that, but I did find a series of videos recorded by Craig Martin, from Knotion Consulting in South Africa (thanks to Sunil Babu for his blog post that provided the tip).

The first and last two minutes are, understandably, an advert for the training that Knotion provides but then Craig gets into a really easy to understand overview of TOGAF and broader enterprise architecture concepts, even diving into service oriented architecture (SOA) at one point.  These are freely available on YouTube but, based on watching them, I would suggest that Craig could package up some training content for remote delivery and it would be a worthwhile investment for people in the same situation as me. In fairness, I did start to get lost towards the end, and the overview doesn’t seem to strictly follow the TOGAF materials (that may be seen as a good thing!) but the first hour was really useful – there is definitely a market for high quality subscription-based training in this space. Remote delivery ought to drive down the costs and it would certainly be better than the Architecting  The Enterprise course that I attended (of course, that’s a personal view and your mileage may vary – I’m sure many people enjoy hours and hours of very dull PowerPoint content mixed with some group exercises and squeezed into 4 days when 5 would be more appropriate…).

Of course, Craig’s 90 minute introduction isn’t everything I need to pass the exam but it has helped to cement a lot of concepts in my mind. After watching the videos, I stopped working through the course materials in detail, and concentrated on a more general understanding of the Architecture Development Model (ADM) and the related TOGAF concepts. The TOGAF Version 9 Pocket Guide (which was provided on my training course) helped here, as did the Practice Test Papers (also from the course but available online for a fee).  Other potentially useful resources include:

I’m still not sure I have enough knowledge to pass the exam (we’ll see – my scores in the practice tests were OK but not outstanding) but I do feel better prepared and, if anyone finds some useful, modern, engaging aids to learning about enterprise architecture in general and TOGAF specifically, then please do leave a comment!