Archimate is an open and independent enterprise architecture modelling language that enables organisations to communicate, design, analyse and manage their enterprise architecture in a visual way.
It provides a comprehensive and consistent modelling language to describe, visualise, analyse and validate the architecture of an enterprise. The language is developed and maintained by The Open Group, the same body behind TOGAF.
The key idea is that enterprise architecture isn’t just about IT systems. It spans business processes, applications, technology infrastructure, and the people and motivations that drive it all. Archimate gives you a common vocabulary across all of those layers so that a business architect, an application architect, and a technology architect can all be talking about the same thing.
There are three main layers:
Business layer — the visible behaviour of the organisation. Processes, functions, actors, roles, and the services they exchange. This is where strategy meets execution.
Application layer — the applications that support the business. How data flows, how services are composed, where the boundaries sit between systems.
Technology layer — the infrastructure. Physical devices, networks, middleware, the bits and bytes underneath.
These layers aren’t siloed. Every element in one layer connects to elements in the others. A business process triggers an application function, which runs on a technology node. The model makes those dependencies explicit.
Beyond the layers, there’s a motivation layer — goals, drivers, outcomes, requirements, assessments. This is what most tools get wrong. They model what exists but not why it exists. Archimate’s motivation elements let you trace a technical decision back to a business goal, and from there to the strategic driver that created the goal in the first place.
I’ve used it in a few engagements and the honest assessment is mixed. It’s powerful when you have the discipline to keep the model honest and connected to reality. It’s painful when it becomes an exercise in diagramming for its own sake — which is, unfortunately, the default mode for a lot of enterprise architecture work.
The specification is freely available from The Open Group. The community around it is small but active, and there are several tool vendors that support it, though the experience varies considerably between them.