Enterprise Architecture: How to Design Models & Diagrams

Learn how business architecture defines strategy, governance, organization, and key processes within the TOGAF framework. See why executives use architecture views to optimize the business before IT and data architectures.

Define a two-to-five year business strategy view that guides the CEO and board with resources, it needs, customers, and competitive positioning through external and internal assessments and a transformation roadmap.

The organization view is a high-level model that describes how the company is structured by portfolio, team, and role, without names for privacy, to guide IT alignment and governance.

Develop and align the business service view by listing all organizational services, grouping them by function, and using APQC or BIAN frameworks to map IT overlay and data.

Align business services with IT and data using the business service and information diagram, mapping information needs and required IT resources; start in Excel, then move to visuals.

Explore the business interaction matrix, an enterprise architecture view, to map touch points between business units, reveal the center of gravity, and guide IT prioritization and budget planning.

Discover how to build a business locations catalog in Excel or as a map to track offices and stores across geographies, allocate IT services, and evaluate performance.

Explore how a functional decomposition diagram serves as a core enterprise architecture artifact, connecting the business service view and the process catalog, following the recommended spreadsheet-driven approach with subtasks.

Describe diverse users with the persona view—customers and staff—by demographics, needs, and behavior to align products, services, and experiences for marketing and IT teams.

Build and maintain a formal process catalogue, a process hierarchy that maps every organizational process to business services, enabling Lean and Six Sigma optimization and customer-focused improvements.

Develop a process model that describes how a process is executed, aligning with the process catalog and business service view to reduce time and cost while improving customer experience.

Explore data architecture as the framework for organizing an organization's logical and physical data assets. Learn how data lifecycle concepts, security, and classification align data with business needs and strategy.

Leverage the data governance framework to define an enterprise-wide data management approach via nine components, guiding policies, artifacts, and roles from data stewards to CIO.

Identify business data needs with the information requirements view, a framework guiding stakeholder-driven prioritization. Use pen, PowerPoint, or Excel to map attributes to value and storage.

Explore the information hierarchy view, ranking policy documents and data by importance, criticality, and lifecycle to guide data architects and leaders.

Learn to build a data flow model that overlays a business process model, detailing the information needed to move between tasks and identify data criticality and security.

Define the physical exchange model to map data flows between apps and infrastructure, assess interoperability, identify critical systems, and guide optimization and cybersecurity, using Salesforce, Windows, and Dropbox as examples.

Explore infrastructure architecture, its tools and templates, and how hardware, software, networks, and communications support the deployment of business data and application services.

Analyze how business units require IT infrastructure to deliver goods and services. Map these needs to the infrastructure requirements view, aligning to cloud, service catalog, and standardized components.

Explore the infrastructure logical model, an architecture diagram of IT infrastructure with connections, as-is and to-be states, TOGAF alignment. Engage stakeholders to identify gaps and security enhancements for IT transformation.

Map IT infrastructure to core business services to build a resource needs model that lists people, vendors, costs, and maintenance, visualized with logos for executive clarity.

Explore the system to application cross reference, an enterprise architecture artifact linking infrastructure to SaaS apps, highlighting data flows, service catalog, security gaps, and patch management to optimize IT spend.

Map business units to it infrastructure with a system to cross reference in Excel. Track usage across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and IBM servers to cut waste and costs.

Develop an infrastructure security architecture model that maps all infrastructure to security controls, using diagrams or spreadsheets, and inventories assets with patching, encryption, remote access, and data classifications.

Explore how to model and diagram application architecture using templates and tools, linking applications to core business processes through enterprise architecture practices.

Explore the application architecture framework, or the H model, to categorize organizational apps into logical groups and map them to the service catalog, data, and security.

Use the application to data cross-reference to reveal each application's purpose and the data it holds, guiding cost, utilization, and integration decisions.

Configure Microsoft Visio for enterprise architecture diagrams by setting landscape orientation and an A3 canvas. Enable grid for alignment and use black and white themes to simplify printing.

Learn how to use Visio Professional for enterprise architecture, drawing shapes and connectors, setting canvas size and orientation (A3 landscape), using grid and snap to grid, and presentation mode.

Learn to craft an infrastructure logical model using Visio, depicting internal infrastructure, external web gateway, firewall, cloud, data store, and devices, with clear connections and a lifelike view for stakeholders.

Build a business process model using BPMN shapes in Visio, starting with a start event, then tasks, gateways, and an end event. Connect and color elements for enterprise architecture diagrams.