ArchiMate® Forum: Workshop (Open Session)
Wednesday, April 27
Objective of Meeting
The main goal of the meeting was to present a real case study of the ArchiMate® standard application in a customer organization. The presentation was delivered by the Minister of Finance from The Netherlands and it was about an Overview and Insight - a practical approach to connect business, applications, and technology with the ArchiMate modeling language. The case presentation was delivered by Lourens Riemens and Marcel van Dijk (Ministerie van Financien). After the main presentation there was a panel discussion and brainstorming session in which attendees could share their experiences and opinions. This was an Open Session so we also had participation from other companies besides the Forum members.
Summary
Case Study Presentation
The case study was about how the Minister of Finance has applied the ArchiMate standard to construct an application portfolio for the Tax and Customs Administration area. The case is a practical application for modeling the whole landscape for the application portfolio also mapped with the business processes and with the infrastructure supporting them.
The principal drivers for the project development had been the need to deal with a high level of computerization, legacy and complex platforms, and high non-flexible costs, so the main drivers are to guarantee continuity, optimize costs (efficiency and effectiveness), and deal with change.
The main achievements form the portfolio analysis: applications and services not used that had been consuming resources, critical business applications having technical issues, interconnections between applications that need to be improved, applications that are costly to maintain and not delivering much value. These findings led the development of projects to improve this and rationalize and optimize the landscape.
Q&A Session
After the presentations attendees asked questions about the case, especially the approach taken and the lessons learned. Presenters explained the different points at a higher level of detail.
There was also a panel discussion with the presenters and authors of the case to brainstorm and share experiences. Key lessons learned were defined: the relevance of having a standardized metamodel, small iterations, incremental value delivery, reuse existing data/metrics, etc.
As a wrap-up and next steps on the case, the speakers explained the next actions in the project roadmap.
Outputs
- Detailed meeting minutes and a record of the actions defined in the session aimed to improve the standard adoption and application in real case situations.
- File presentation provided by the speakers that will be uploaded to the site.
Next Steps
- Continue to follow up on the case study to be published and also to promote another presentation of the case as part of The Open Group event in Paris.
- Organize a webinar based in the case.
- Promote cases like this as a good example of the usage of the standard not also for technical but also and mainly for business purposes.
- Continue with the working activities in the Forum to support market awareness and the standard usage.
- Follow up on the case study the presenters are also working on.
- Continue with this effort to have activities like this in other Open Group events.
- Improve the promotion of the ArchiMate standard used for business and strategy modeling.
- Publish the conclusions on the presentation so attendees can have access to the related documentation.