TOGAF

TOGAF — The Open Group Architecture Framework — is the dominant enterprise architecture framework, first published in 1995 out of the US Department of Defense’s TAFIM work and Capgemini’s Integrated Architecture Framework, and maintained ever since by The Open Group. It is deliberately not a modeling notation like ArchiMate and not a taxonomy like a capability catalogue; it is a method for producing, governing, and evolving an architecture, plus the scaffolding an organization needs to keep doing that repeatedly. The current release is the TOGAF Standard, 10th Edition (25 April 2022), which split the material into a stable Fundamental Content core and a growing set of TOGAF Series Guides covering specific configurations and use cases.

• The Architecture Development Method (ADM) - The heart of it. A cyclic method running Preliminary → Architecture Vision → Business Architecture → Information Systems Architectures (data and application) → Technology Architecture → Opportunities and Solutions → Migration Planning → Implementation Governance → Architecture Change Management, with Requirements Management sitting at the center of every phase.
• Four architecture domains - Business, Data, Application, and Technology — the split that put “business architecture” and “technology architecture” in the same sentence for a generation of practitioners.
• Content Framework and Metamodel - A formal structure defining the artifacts each phase produces and how they relate, so architecture output is a connected model rather than a folder of diagrams. Business Capability is one of its core building blocks in Phase B.
• Enterprise Continuum and Architecture Repository - A classification scheme running from generic foundation architectures to organization-specific solutions, and a defined place to keep the reference models, patterns, standards, and building blocks you reuse.
• Architecture Capability Framework - Guidance on the architecture function itself — the Architecture Review Board, governance, skills, contracts, and maturity — which is the part organizations most often skip and most often need.
• Certification and vocabulary - A large certification portfolio and, more importantly, a shared vocabulary. TOGAF’s real power is that “Phase B”, “building block”, and “architecture repository” mean roughly the same thing across companies and continents.

TOGAF is where API governance and enterprise architecture are supposed to meet, and mostly don’t. Phase C — Information Systems Architectures — is precisely where an API estate should be described, and the Content Metamodel already has the slots: an interface is a building block, a service contract is an artifact, and Phase G’s Implementation Governance is exactly the review gate a design-time API standard belongs in. In practice API programs grow up inside platform teams and never touch the architecture repository, so the enterprise ends up with two disconnected inventories — a set of architecture models that describe capabilities nobody can call, and a set of OpenAPI contracts nobody can trace to a business outcome.

The agentic turn makes closing that gap worth real money. An agent reading API contracts can see what operations exist; it cannot see which business capability an operation serves, which value stream it participates in, or whether calling it is governed. TOGAF supplies the frame for that context, ArchiMate supplies the notation, and a machine-readable reference model like the Turbo EA Reference Catalog supplies the actual identifiers — the piece TOGAF itself has always left as an exercise for the reader. The framework’s weakness has never been its concepts; it is that four hundred pages of method produce artifacts in slide decks and Visio files, while everything downstream now needs YAML and JSON.