As a digital consultancy, a deeper understanding of enterprise architecture enables us to better serve our clients and their business targets. For enterprise architects and IT professionals, certifications like TOGAF can play a significant role in career development and organizational growth.

Our TOGAF certification helps us accomplish both of these things. In this article, we’ll explain what TOGAF is and what the TOGAF certification means for our clientele and their enterprise architecture.

What is TOGAF Certification?

The Open Group Architecture Framework, or TOGAF, is an enterprise architecture framework that provides a standard way to implement software technology architectures. By following a systematic approach, companies can design, plan and implement enterprise architecture while reducing errors, staying on budget, and aligning with business goals and objectives.

TOGAF also ensures a repeatable process where steps can be followed again and again to produce high-quality results. By following TOGAF, businesses can better define requirements before projects are started. The most recent version of the framework, TOGAF 10, was released on April 25, 2022. It introduced a modular structure that makes it easier to apply TOGAF and follow best practices across different organizations, industries, and architecture styles. However, TOGAF certification is currently only available for TOGAF 9.2.

Domains

There are four architecture domains or specializations that form part of TOGAF:

• Business: This domain includes business strategies, processes, organization, and governance.
• Application: This describes and documents how local and physical data assets are structured and the related data management resources.
• Data: A blueprint for how individual systems should be deployed, application system interactions, and how these interactions relate to business processes.
• Technical: This domain describes the hardware, software, and network infrastructure required to support critical applications.

Architectural Development Method

The architecture development method (ADM) is a core part of TOGAF and the TOGAF certification process, as it refers to an iterative and cyclic process used to develop an enterprise architecture via performance engineering. The ADM is customized to fit an organization’s unique needs rather than being a one-size-fits-all approach.

Enterprise Continuum

Enterprise continuum is a method for classifying architecture on a continuum ranging from foundational architectures to organization-specific architectures that are highly customized.

What are the Benefits of TOGAF Certification?

TOGAF matters to enterprise organizations for many reasons:

1. Growing Importance of Architecture Choice

The architecture a company chooses to implement continues to grow in importance. Modern businesses are moving away from bulky systems that often include redundancy, increase project complexity and rely on heavy maintenance.

Instead, architecture has become a business choice, not just an IT one, with modern companies moving towards approaches like MACH that ensure greater freedom and agility. TOGAF supports that freedom and agility by providing a standard that makes it easier for organizations to work within the architecture framework in a manner that fits their needs and provides exactly what the business requires to be successful. A TOGAF certification will allow teams to take full advantage of TOGAF when it comes to their business success.

Read More: Future-proof Your Business with MACH Architecture

2. Consistency and Control

TOGAF is a consistent, controlled, and proven framework that helps get key stakeholders on the same page, thus making collaboration easier and increasing the chance of business success – another reason as to why a TOGAF certification is so beneficial to teams.

3. Better Resource Assessment

By following TOGAF, organizations can first assess their resources before diving into new approaches and technologies. They can then decide on a plan of action, driven by solid architecture principles, based on what they want to achieve and what they still need to include to achieve it rather than simply opting for the hottest thing on the market. A TOGAF certification ensures best practices are followed.

4. Improved Focus and Quality Assurance

A TOGAF certification keeps enterprise architects focused on ensuring that quality is achieved and that architecture principles are valid and adhered to, across the enterprise.

It streamlines enterprise architecture development so it can be replicated with fewer issues. This is achieved using a common language that aligns business and IT to clarify things for everyone involved.

What TOGAF Certification Means for Content Bloom

With a growing number of our enterprise architects and IT staff continuing to gain TOGAF certification, it helps Content Bloom to improve in several areas.

• Stamp of Approval: TOGAF certification provides a stamp of approval for clients and demonstrates to our clients that we are committed to following the best industry standards.
• TOGAF Improves Processes: We will significantly improve internal and external processes where we work with clients.
• Following Best Practices: TOGAF certification represents an industry standard for enterprise architecture; within this, we will continue to develop best practices and ensure that we follow them to enable us to continue to deliver the solutions our clients need.
• TOGAF Improves Communication: TOGAF helps us communicate more effectively with all stakeholders involved in defining and delivering client strategy.

Contact us today and inquire about our host of digital consultancy services, including custom development, headless implementation, project management, and more, to see how Content Bloom can assist you.