Top 10 Most Common TOGAF Pitfalls.
First off,
TOGAF 9.1 is very valuable and powerful tool for enterprise architecture and overall enterprise architecture management. That being said, we see more and more people expecting too much from TOGAF 9.1 or trying to use it in innovative ways without being aware of its limitations, which leads to the increase of TOGAF 9.1 project failures and user disappointment. It is not the silver bullet for the entire enterprise architecture management capability. You would normally augment with other tools or frameworks.
This article should help the practitioner to avoid the most common TOGAF pitfalls and disappointment, by explaining top 10 key TOGAF limitations. These restrictions should not be seen as reasons not to utilize TOGAF, but as a guide on what you can do with this tool.
TOGAF 9.1 limitations:1. TOGAF is mainly domain oriented, which leads to the loss of integration over the EA and it lacks the tools to show how the business components are connected to the applied strategy.
2. It does not make the difference between components that are a part of its framework and those that are part of its strategy. The result is a maturity loss, which is crucial for company's success in the early phases of EA adoption.
3. TOGAF is centered around IT. Therefore, it fails to specify the problem, which is to optimize the company's ability to deliver value and control expenses in the implementation of its strategy and not simply about the processes and applications.
4. TOGAF modeling principles are focused on narrow aspects of enterprise architecture instead of guiding transformation of the entire enterprise.
5. It does not show how the elements of the business are connected to the strategy, which creates gaps between the strategy and the business model, cost model, service model, revenue model, etc.
6. TOGAF lacks a consistent method for management of processes and their life cycles, which leads to processes being out of context and inconsistent. Another problem presents the absence of the tools for ensuring that the processes are complete and that processes which do not bring value are eliminated.
7. Another pitfall is the lack of specifics on infrastructure architecture or platform architecture, which leads to the lack of integration between the major aspects of information architecture, application architecture, data architecture and the particular technology architecture of infrastructure and platform architecture.
8. TOGAF does not include the role of maturity in process, competency or capability and gives no linkage between organizational factors and maturity, which leads to slower transformation and limited support for innovations.
9. It provides no guidance to practitioners in term on how should they think about EA, utilize EA concepts, or which tools should be used for analysis and design. This results in chaos as practitioners need to go through the expensive and time-consuming process of reinventing the required methods, tools, and practices.
10. TOGAF does not recognize the connections between business and applications, nor does it provide necessary tools for understanding the business problems that can be addressed by a wide variety of solutions in the application layer.
ConclusionAll of these TOGAF pitfalls are listed to show you the realistic capabilities of TOGAF and to encourage the introduction of new features that will address these issues in some of the future TOGAF releases.
keywords: TOGAF, enterprise architecture, enterprise architecture management, EA tools
