Welcome to GTRA

I taught a TOGAF certification course in Montreal this week which had participants from Health Canada and Revenue Canada, both national government agencies. One of the course exercises was to conduct a SWOT analysis on the adoption of TOGAF. I grouped the government participants together and they came up with the following (my comments are in parentheses):

Strengths

·                     Well defined approach (They saw the well-proven Architecture Development Method as key to successful adoption)

·                     Open source - backed by government, private industry

·                     Government background / origin (TOGAF is a direct descendant of DoD’s Technical Architecture for Information Management – TAFIM. Also, the Canadian government has been a major contributor to TOGAF 9)

·                     Can be tailored (Terminology, process and relationship to other frameworks and methods can all be tailored to meet a particular organization’s needs)

·                     Not tied to particular tool, technology

·                     training readily available, affordable

·                     momentum/adoption growing in government, private sector (85% of Fortune 50 companies have adopted TOGAF. It is mandated by the UK government for all departments.)

·                     Fits with other frameworks and methods (PMI,CMMI, ITIL)

Weaknesses

·                     Artifacts in early stage of development (Previously TOGAF had no defined artifacts. TOGAF 9 released a full set in definition form early this year. A month ago they released examples.)

·                     Tough to sell to business (TOGAF can easily be perceived as too IT oriented.)

·                     Not intuitive (It takes a few hours to get even a high-level understanding of TOGAF.)

·                     Hard to get adoption at the business level

·                     Difficulty in managing complexity (Properly tailored, TOGAF can deal well with complexity.)

Opportunities

·                     Build on existing library of artifacts (The Content Framework has dozens of artifacts with descriptions and examples. Organizations can add their own to these.)

·                     Already leaning towards TOGAF as a government standard (Health Canada is strongly in favor of TOGAF, as is the Defense Ministry.)

·                     Leverage private/public implementations (Governments become part of the rapidly growing international TOGAF community.)

·                     Help transform business (TOGAF goes beyond the concept of ‘aligning IT with business’ to the emerging paradigm of ‘architecting the enterprise’.)

Threats

·                     Appears complicated (700+ pages, a lot of quotation from ANSI, ISO, etc.)

·                     Tough to sell

·                     Competition (Zachman, DoDAF, etc.)

·                     Eliminating duplication in hardware and software (Although this is also a strength, it may threaten turf for important stakeholders. This is true of EA overall, not just TOGAF.)

Even though this SWOT exercise only took thirty minutes, the analysis results from participants mulling TOGAF over for four days. I thought their analysis was quite perceptive.