TOGAF" 9 and ITIL v3 7
As with ITIL, TOGAF also has a long history. It was developed
and is currently maintained as a standard by The Open Group:
a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium focused on a
diverse range of open standards and af liated certi cation
programmes, and also for advancing the profession of
Enterprise Architecture.
The rst version of TOGAF, developed in 1995, was based
on the US Department of Defense s Technical Architecture
Framework for Information Management (TAFIM). Following on
from this, The Open Group Architecture Forum has developed
successive versions of TOGAF at regular intervals and published
each one on The Open Group public website.
Each version of the TOGAF standard is developed collaboratively
by the members of the Architecture Forum currently more
than 200 corporate members, including vendor and customer
organizations. The development is carried out by architecture
practitioners, with the content based on proven best practices
that evolved within the participating member companies.
The rst seven versions of TOGAF addressed technology
architecture based on the adoption of architecture in
businesses at the time each was written. In 2002, Version 8
(the Enterprise Edition ) was published, and was followed by
a series of improvements to Version 8.1 in 2003 and Version
8.1.1 in 2006. It expanded the scope of TOGAF from a purely
technology architecture to an Enterprise Architecture, by
including business and information systems architecture in the
new version.
In 2004, The Open Group launched a TOGAF certi cation
programme for individuals and organizations. Anybody who
wanted to be certi ed as a practitioner of TOGAF could either
attend a certi ed training course presented by a training
provider or complete an online examination. There has been a
popular uptake of this programme by architects globally, with
more than 9,400 certi ed practitioners as of January 2009,
emphasizing that TOGAF is one of the leading architecture
frameworks worldwide.
The role of architecture in organizations has changed from a
focus on design, towards one which attempts to explain the
details of the existing and future state of certain parts of the
IT capability in an organization. It has increasingly become
a process to help organizations make the right decisions
about their future and to show them how to get there. By
combining input from different stakeholders, architects
can help organizations to reduce the complexity of today s
IT and organizational landscape. The growing success of
a framework such as TOGAF underlines this development.
TOGAF was one of the rst models with a strong emphasis
on this process approach to architecture in the organization.
In fact, architecture must be seen as an organization-wide
process that will be directed by management, with the support
of the enterprise architect. The (enterprise) architect has
therefore changed from a technical individual to someone with
organizational sensitivity.
In TOGAF s latest version, alongside a higher level of detail in
the description of the architecture, there is increasing re ection
on the use of the architecture and its governance. This marks
the point when TOGAF begins to deal with other elds of
expertise. At this stage, what can be achieved by means of the
architecture becomes TOGAF s biggest concern. This is, in a way,
the same kind of development as that in ITIL, where support
to the business is vital. In TOGAF 9 the architecture is not the
ultimate goal; that is instead the things an organization can
achieve with architecture. Furthermore, it is not the architect
but the owners and the executers who receive the bene ts
of the new version of TOGAF at the deployment phase. The
architecture focuses more on the soft side of the discipline and
less on the technical content side.
Following the publication of TOGAF 8.1.1, the Architecture
Forum began its work on TOGAF Version 9 (publicly available in
February 2009). In order to meet the needs of TOGAF users, a
survey was conducted in the rst quarter of 2007 to determine
the requirements for the next version. Three prominent views
were expressed in this survey:
The need for closer alignment with the business
The desire for simple implementation and greater usability
The next version of TOGAF to be an evolution rather than
a revolution.
These views provided the required direction for the developers
of TOGAF 9 to get started on the next revision. Emerging
architecture trends, such as service-oriented architecture
and the emphasis on security, were also considered, as well
as alignment with The Open Group vision of Boundaryless
Information Flow.
History of TOGAF
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