Tom Graves / Tetradian Commentary on TRAK

At the risk of descending into the BBC’s habit of trailing their own programmes ...

Thanks to a post from Rich Hilliard on the TRAK group on LinkedIn I came across Tom’s article on his blog about TRAK, posted on Saturday titled ‘How to get enterprise-architecture on TRAK’:

At last – at last – there’s now a ‘framework for enterprise-architecture’ that’s actually worthy of that title. ...

Although in a few places this does show its physical-engineering heritage, in effect this is a generic high-level metamodel suitable for use in enterprise-architectures for any type of organisation. (This is a very important contrast to the metamodels in TOGAF or even in Archimate [Business, Application and Technology layers], which at present are effectively usable only for IT-centric architectures in information-oriented enterprises such as banks, finance, insurance and the like.) ...

and it finishes

Anyway, definitely worth a detailed look. Even from a fairly cursory review to date, my own strong opinion is that for TOGAF-type architecture-developments that could touch any space beyond IT, we should all standardise on something like this as a base-metamodel, rather than the as-yet unusably-incomplete one provided in the TOGAF 9 specification.

Recommended – very recommended.
...

Not all bad then!

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External Links

• Tom Graves/Tetradian Blog

Putting the Architectural Modelling Community First - What You Can Expect to See

This current site is really only a interim site. What is intended is a site that properly supports the folks using TRAK or other MDAF-based architecture frameworks and one which represents the ethos behind it:-

• pragmatic - led by need and application - the human interface to the framework (usability, affordance etc.)
• open - decisions, rationale, explanation
• democratic - involve the community in the site content rather than broadcast top down what I/we think folks need. The centre of gravity ought to be with the users rather than the specifiers-of the framework
• fun - why not? Systems thinkers/engineers and architects are real, dare I say it ‘whole’ people and all sides need to be addressed
• dynamic - the content needs to be able to change and adapt to new circumstances, thinking or practice

What You Might Expect

The features that you should expect to see are:-

• each section of the site is a ‘blog’
  • articles can be discussed and commented on by site members
  • updates notified by RSS news feeds
• articles can be linked together, tagged, put into categories and dynamically sorted/displayed and searched for by users
• discussion forums
  • tool support
  • use of architecture frameworks
  • modelling / repository organisation - not governed by frameworks but important and common to all
• architects can submit examples of views to help others
• wiki to hold facts on architecture frameworks e.g. metamodel elements, use of UML tools, tips, plugins etc.
• single sign-on to comment, add a forum discussion or to add to the wiki
• everyone can see everything - nothing hidden
  • only site members can contribute or comment - contributors and commenters recognised and stand up to the mark!
• fun / anarchic humour
  • the lighter side
  • not taking life too seriously

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External Links