The most common hurdle for participants is the information overload. Both the ArchiMate metamodel and all the ArchiMate concepts with their definitions may be overwhelming to absorb. There are only three days in which all this information is presented and explained, with limited time available for exercises. This is where some preparation is going to help you immensely.
You are about to participate in an ArchiMate® training? To make the training as effective as possible: please prepare in advance.
Coming from the UML world, I have been an accredited ArchiMate® trainer for many years, as well as working with ArchiMate almost from the birth of the language in The Netherlands in my consultancy work. The language was intended to be as simple as possible, even to the extent that the ArchiMate community originally had the ambition that it would be simple enough to be used by “the business”, i.e. non-architects or people that did not need specific training or experience to read or use the diagrams. However this was soon abandoned because in spite of the goal of simplicity (which in my opinion has been successfully achieved) there is of course a conflict of interest for the language to be complete enough for enterprise architecture as well as to serve as a complete-enough spec for the TOGAF Content Framework, which is from another standard from The Open Group.
- To start with: get the website with the official spec in your favourites: the online edition of the ArchiMate 3.2 Specification (please note that a web account for The Open Group is required to access this resource).
- Play with an ArchiMate tool. I suggest Archi: https://www.archimatetool.com. If you do, I urge you to make a donation – the devs are doing incredible work! Of course if your company already uses a tool, see if you are able to access that.
- Import or navigate example ArchiMate models:
- There is a nice concise introduction to ArchiMate: https://archimate-community.pages.opengroup.org/workgroups/archimate-101/
If you take a few hours to invest in researching these references, you will have created a set of “hooks” in your mind to better connect the information that you receive in the training.
Good luck!
Rob Vens
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