The Enterprise Continuum: Principles

Overview

This section introduces the concept of the Enterprise Continuum, which sets the broader context for TOGAF, by explaining the different types and scopes of the architectures that can be derived from it.

The Enterprise Continuum is an important aid to communication and understanding, both within individual organizations, and between customer and vendor organizations. Without an understanding of "where in the continuum you are", people discussing architecture can often talk at cross purposes because they are referencing different points in the continuum at the same time without realizing it.

Not only does the Enterprise Continuum represent an aid to communication, it represents an aid to organizing re-usable architecture and solution assets. This is explained further below.

An architecture defines the components that constitute a system, the responsibilities and rules for each component, and the relationships among the components.

Any architecture is context specific; for example, there are architectures that are specific to individual customers, industries, subsystems, products, and services. Architects, on both the buy side and supply side, must have at their disposal a consistent language to effectively communicate the differences between architectures. Such a language will enable engineering efficiency and the effective leveraging of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) product functionality. The Enterprise Continuum provides that consistent language.

The Constituents of the Enterprise Continuum

The "Enterprise Continuum" is a phrase that denotes the combination of two complementary concepts: the "Architecture Continuum" and the "Solutions Continuum".

The Architecture Continuum offers a consistent way to define and understand the generic rules, representations and relationships in an information system. The Architecture Continuum represents a structuring of re-usable architecture assets. The Architecture Continuum is directly supported by the Solutions Continuum (see below). The Architecture Continuum shows the relationships among foundational frameworks such as TOGAF, product and common systems architectures, solution architectures, and organization architectures. The Architecture Continuum is a useful tool to discover commonality and eliminate unnecessary redundancy.

The Solutions Continuum provides a consistent way to describe and understand the implementation of the Architecture Continuum. The Solutions Continuum defines what is available in the organizational environment as re-usable building blocks. The solutions are the results of agreements, between customers and business partners, that implement the rules and relationships defined in the architecture space. The Solutions Continuum addresses the commonalties and differences among the products, systems and services of implemented systems.

Following subsections first outline the Architecture Continuum and Solutions Continuum separately, and then explain how they come together to form the Enterprise Continuum.