September 19th, 2006: Using TOGAF in practice

TOGAF is a framework/method developed by an international group of IT-vendors. It is designed to (re-)document the current en future IT of an organisation, including the way to get to the proposed future.

In practice TOGAF is a comprehensive re-documentation effort of the current IT of an organisation. It includes a limited view on the needs of the organisation and focusses on the new IT-infrastructure an organisations intends to create, and on the way to get there.

Clearly TOGAF contains the IT-vendors view on information and IT in organisations, their customers. The framework/method fully under-exposes the information an organisation has and wants. The knowledge of the information enable organisations to be pro-active in their discussions with IT-vendors, and TOGAF does not address this issue from the position an organisation needs. Furthermore, the effort to do a very detailed and time-consuming re-documentation of the existing IT-infrastructure is questionable, if necessary at all.

As a conclusion:

• TOGAF introduces a lot of work to be done. mainly by IT-vendors. The added value of this work is at least questionable because most of it re-documents what is already there.
• Some of the demand-side issues are addressed in a manner to be expected from IT-vendors. The strength an organisation can get from developing its knowledge of information is minimal. For that reason a strong pro-active approach of IT-vendors based on knowledge is not developed.

For details, see the observation on TOGAF 8 and 9