05 — Library · 47 frameworks and standards

Frameworks

Frameworks, standards, notations and methods an architect meets, and when each is worth reaching for.

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Frameworks

Showing 9 of 47 frameworks and standards

FW-450
ACORD Standards
Standard
ACORD
A family of insurance industry data standards maintained by a nonprofit association of carriers, brokers and vendors: standard forms, message formats for exchanging policy, billing and claim data between distribution partners and carriers, and information and data models that define insurance concepts in shared terms.
Use · Reach for it when exchanging data between agencies, brokers, carriers and reinsurers, or when seeding an insurance data model. Full access to the specifications generally needs membership, and each trading partner still agrees its own implementation profile.
Governs · Insurance Products & Policy,Insurance Claims
Terms · Reference Model,Master Data
Related · IEC Common Information Model (CIM),DAMA-DMBOK
Official page ↗
FW-290
APQC Process Classification Framework
Reference Model
APQC
A cross-industry taxonomy of business processes arranged in levels from categories down to activities and tasks, with industry-specific variants and process definitions, used as a common reference for process documentation and benchmarking.
Use · Reach for it as a checklist when building a process inventory or comparing performance. It classifies processes, not capabilities; copying its categories into a capability map produces verbs where nouns belong.
Governs · Process Architecture & Ownership
Terms · Business Process,Reference Model
Related · BPMN,TM Forum Business Process Framework (eTOM),BIZBOK Guide
Official page ↗
FW-120
arc42
Method
arc42 (Gernot Starke, Peter Hruschka)
An open template for documenting software architecture in twelve sections, from goals, constraints and context through building blocks, runtime and deployment views to decisions, quality requirements, risks and a glossary.
Use · Use it to give every system's documentation the same shape so readers know where to look. It structures the document but not the thinking; empty sections are a sign to trim, not to fill.
Governs · Solution Design
Terms · Architecture Decision Record,Building Block
Related · C4 Model,ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010
Official page ↗
FW-020
ArchiMate
Notation
The Open Group
A modeling language for enterprise architecture with a defined set of elements and relationships across strategy, business, application, technology and implementation layers, so one model can show how a capability is realized all the way down to infrastructure.
Use · Use it when several architects must draw cross-layer views that a tool can check and reuse. Its rigor is the price: readers need some training, and executive audiences usually want a simplified view drawn from the model.
Governs · Business Architecture,Application & Technology Architecture
Terms · Viewpoint,Enterprise Architecture,Business Capability
Related · TOGAF Standard,BPMN,UML,ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010
Official page ↗
FW-260
AsyncAPI
Standard
AsyncAPI Initiative
A machine-readable format for describing message-driven and event-driven APIs: channels, operations, messages, payload schemas and protocol bindings for brokers such as Kafka, AMQP and MQTT. Its structure is deliberately close to OpenAPI.
Use · Use it to document and govern event contracts the way OpenAPI does for HTTP. Tool support is thinner than for OpenAPI, and it does not replace a schema registry for runtime compatibility checks.
Governs · Integration & API Delivery,API Design & Governance
Terms · Event-Driven Architecture,API,Integration Pattern
Related · OpenAPI Specification
Official page ↗
FW-190
AWS Well-Architected Framework
Framework
Amazon Web Services
Design guidance for workloads on AWS, organized into six pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization and sustainability, each with design principles and review questions.
Use · Use it to run structured workload reviews before launch or after incidents. Its questions apply widely, but its answers assume AWS services, and a review finds risks without prioritizing them for you.
Governs · Cloud Platform Operations,Solution Design
Related · Azure Well-Architected Framework,Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework,FinOps Framework
Official page ↗
FW-200
Azure Well-Architected Framework
Framework
Microsoft
Design guidance for workloads on Azure, organized into five pillars: reliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence and performance efficiency, with design principles, checklists, tradeoff notes and service-specific guides.
Use · Use it for workload design reviews on Azure and to make pillar tradeoffs explicit. Platform-level concerns such as landing zones and governance sit in separate Microsoft guidance.
Governs · Cloud Platform Operations,Solution Design
Terms · Landing Zone
Related · AWS Well-Architected Framework,Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework,FinOps Framework
Official page ↗
FW-470
BCBS 239
Standard
Basel Committee on Banking Supervision
The Basel Committee's principles for how banks gather, reconcile and report risk data, published in 2013 for systemically important banks. They cover governance and data architecture, the accuracy, completeness and timeliness of aggregation, the quality of risk reports, and how supervisors review all of this.
Use · Reach for it to justify and scope risk data lineage, reconciliation and data ownership in a bank. It sets outcomes, not a data model or tooling, and supervisors judge compliance by evidence that reports can be produced quickly and correctly under stress.
Governs · Risk Data Aggregation,Supervisory Data Requests,Data Ownership & Stewardship,Data Quality Management
Terms · Data Lineage,Data Governance,System of Record
Related · DAMA-DMBOK,BIAN
Official page ↗
FW-440
BIAN
Reference Model
Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN)
A reference architecture for banking published by a member association of banks and vendors. It divides the bank into fine-grained, non-overlapping service domains, each owning one business responsibility, and pairs them with business objects and semantic API definitions so banks and vendors can describe systems in common terms.
Use · Use it to partition a banking application landscape, test vendor scope against a neutral map and shape service and API boundaries. It is granular and large, and most banks map to it rather than adopt it. It starts from service domains; recent releases add a business capability model alongside them.
Governs · Deposits & Accounts,Lending & Credit,Payments & Cards,Wealth & Investment Management,Financial Crime,Prudential Risk & Regulatory Reporting
Terms · Reference Model,Bounded Context,API
Related · ISO 20022,TM Forum Business Process Framework (eTOM),ArchiMate,OpenAPI Specification
Official page ↗
FW-040
BIZBOK Guide
Framework
Business Architecture Guild
A body of knowledge for business architecture that sets out how to model capabilities, value streams, information concepts and organization, and how to tie them to strategy, initiatives and investment decisions. It also publishes industry reference models for members.
Use · Reach for it to anchor capability and value stream modeling in a published practice. The full guide and its reference models are members-only, and it stops at the business layer, leaving applications and technology to other frameworks.
Governs · Business Architecture
Terms · Business Capability,Capability Map,Capability Level,Value Stream,Value Stream Stage,Business Architecture
Related · TOGAF Standard,APQC Process Classification Framework
Official page ↗
FW-080
BPMN
Notation
Object Management Group
A graphical notation for business processes with defined semantics for events, activities, gateways, pools and message flows. Version 2.0.2 also gives an interchange format, so models can move between tools and, in some engines, be executed.
Use · Use it when a process must be read the same way by business and engineering, or automated. Its full symbol set overwhelms casual readers; a disciplined subset serves most diagrams.
Governs · Process Documentation & Modeling
Terms · Business Process
Related · ArchiMate,UML,APQC Process Classification Framework
Official page ↗
FW-090
C4 Model
Notation
Simon Brown
A lightweight way to diagram software architecture at four zoom levels: system context, containers, components and code. It fixes a small set of abstractions and leaves shapes and colors open, so diagrams stay consistent without a heavy notation.
Use · Reach for it to document a single software system for developers and stakeholders. It is deliberately silent on enterprise-wide views, business architecture and deployment detail beyond its supplementary diagrams.
Governs · Solution Design
Terms · Viewpoint
Related · UML,arc42,ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010
Official page ↗
FW-420
CALM
Notation
FINOS
An open specification for writing a system's architecture as a JSON document: its nodes, the relationships between them, the interfaces they expose, the business flows that cross them and the controls that apply, checked by JSON Schema and kept in version control beside the code.
Use · Reach for it to make solution architecture reviewable and testable in a delivery pipeline. It describes systems, not the business: pair it with a capability catalog for the business view, as the Blueprint Catalog CALM Standard does. The specification is still young, so pin a release.
Governs · Application & Technology Architecture,Architecture Governance,Solution Architecture
Terms · Architecture as Code,Architecture Description Language
Related · ArchiMate,C4 Model,OpenAPI Specification
Official page ↗
FW-060
COBIT
Framework
ISACA
A framework for the governance and management of enterprise information and technology. COBIT 2019 defines governance and management objectives, the components that support them, design factors for tailoring, and a capability scale for judging how well each objective is met.
Use · Reach for it when audit, risk or the board need a structured view of IT governance and control. It says what should be governed, not how to architect or run it, and a full assessment is heavy.
Governs · IT Strategy & Governance
Terms · Architecture Review Board,Architecture Principle
Related · ITIL,ISO/IEC 27001,NIST Cybersecurity Framework
Official page ↗
FW-150
DAMA-DMBOK
Framework
DAMA International
The Data Management Body of Knowledge, which divides data management into knowledge areas such as governance, architecture, modeling, quality, metadata, master and reference data, integration and security, with roles and practices for each. The current text is the revised second edition.
Use · Reach for it to scope a data management program and agree on terms. It is broad and descriptive; it will not tell you which areas to fund first or how to run them on modern platforms.
Governs · Data & Analytics,Document & Content Management,Metadata & Taxonomy
Terms · Data Governance,Master Data,Data Lineage,System of Record
Related · IEC Common Information Model (CIM)
Official page ↗
FW-390
Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework
Framework
US Office of Management and Budget
The US federal government's framework for agency enterprise architecture, built around a set of consolidated reference models (performance, business, data, application, infrastructure and security) that give agencies a shared vocabulary for comparing and reusing what they run.
Use · Useful as a worked example of reference models applied across many organizations, and required reading for US public-sector work. Its guidance has not been revised since 2013, so treat it as a pattern, not a current rulebook.
Governs · Enterprise Architecture
Terms · Enterprise Architecture,Reference Model
Related · TOGAF Standard,Zachman Framework
Official page ↗
FW-220
FinOps Framework
Framework
FinOps Foundation
A practice framework for managing the cost and value of cloud and other variable technology spend, built from principles, personas, phases, scopes, domains and capabilities, so engineering, finance and product share responsibility for spending decisions.
Use · Reach for it when cloud bills grow faster than anyone can explain. It frames the practice and maturity model; tagging, allocation and the engineering changes that actually cut cost are still yours to do.
Governs · Technology Financial Management,Cloud Platform Operations
Terms · Total Cost of Ownership
Related · TBM Taxonomy,AWS Well-Architected Framework,Azure Well-Architected Framework,Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework
Official page ↗
FW-210
Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework
Framework
Google Cloud
Design guidance for workloads on Google Cloud, organized into pillars for operational excellence; security, privacy and compliance; reliability; cost optimization; performance optimization; and sustainability, with recommendations under each.
Use · Use it for design reviews of Google Cloud workloads. Like its peers it is vendor-shaped, so keep a cloud-neutral set of principles for decisions that span providers.
Governs · Cloud Platform Operations,Solution Design
Related · AWS Well-Architected Framework,Azure Well-Architected Framework,FinOps Framework
Official page ↗
FW-310
IEC Common Information Model (CIM)
Standard
IEC
A family of IEC standards, chiefly IEC 61970 and IEC 61968, that define a shared information model for electric utilities: network topology, assets, measurements and work, so energy management, distribution and market systems can exchange data consistently.
Use · Reach for it when integrating utility operational and enterprise systems or exchanging grid models. The model is large and usually needs a profile per interface; it is not a database design to adopt whole.
Governs · Network Model Publication,Network Connectivity Model
Terms · Reference Model,Operational Technology,Master Data
Related · ISA-95,DAMA-DMBOK
Official page ↗
FW-320
ISA-95
Standard
ISA
The standard for integrating enterprise and manufacturing control systems, also published as IEC 62264. It defines a hierarchy of functional levels from the plant floor to business planning and the information exchanged between operations management and enterprise systems.
Use · Use it to place MES, ERP and control systems on one map and define the interfaces between them. Its level model is often read too literally; modern plants with cloud and edge platforms need judgment to apply it.
Governs · Plant Operations,Production Data Foundations
Terms · Operational Technology,Reference Model
Related · IEC Common Information Model (CIM)
Official page ↗
FW-350
ISO 14001
Standard
ISO
The international requirements for an environmental management system: identify environmental aspects and legal obligations, set objectives, control operations, and monitor and improve environmental performance.
Use · Use it to run environmental compliance and improvement as one managed system, often alongside ISO 9001 and ISO 45001. It structures the program; the targets and the reporting frameworks come from elsewhere.
Governs · Environmental Compliance & Permits,Emissions & Energy,Water, Waste & Resource Use
Related · ISO 9001,ISO 45001
Official page ↗
FW-430
ISO 20022
Standard
ISO (Technical Committee 68, Financial Services)
An international standard for financial messages that starts from a shared business model of the parties, accounts and transactions involved and derives structured message definitions from it, covering payments, cash reporting, securities and trade services, with a public catalog of approved messages.
Use · Reach for it when designing payment, cash reporting or securities interfaces so rich, structured data survives end to end. Each market and clearing system publishes its own usage rules, so the standard alone does not tell you which fields a scheme requires.
Governs · Payment Initiation & Processing,Clearing & Settlement,High-Value, Instant & Cross-Border Payments,Client Balance Reporting,Securities Safekeeping & Settlement,Corporate Action Processing
Terms · API,Information Object
Related · BIAN,AsyncAPI
Official page ↗
FW-370
ISO 22301
Standard
ISO
The international requirements for a business continuity management system: understand which activities matter most, plan how to keep or restore them through a disruption, exercise the plans and improve.
Use · Reach for it to structure a continuity program or prove one to customers and regulators. It covers the management system; IT recovery detail and crisis communication need their own practices.
Governs · Business Impact Analysis,Continuity Planning,Exercising & Continuous Improvement
Related · ISO/IEC 27001
Official page ↗
FW-360
ISO 45001
Standard
ISO
The international requirements for an occupational health and safety management system: assess hazards and risks, involve workers, control work, investigate incidents and improve safety performance.
Use · Use it to give a safety program a certifiable structure across sites and contractors. It does not replace the specific safety regulations of each country or industry.
Governs · Health & Safety,Plant & Process Safety
Related · ISO 9001,ISO 14001
Official page ↗
FW-330
ISO 55000
Standard
ISO
The international standards family for asset management: the vocabulary, principles and management-system requirements for getting value from assets across their whole life, whatever kinds of asset the organization chooses to include, balancing cost, risk and performance.
Use · Use it to frame an asset management policy, strategic plan and decision method that maintenance, finance and engineering share. It says what a management system needs, not how to maintain any particular asset.
Governs · Asset & Maintenance
Related · ISO 9001
Official page ↗
FW-340
ISO 9001
Standard
ISO
The international requirements for a quality management system: understand customers and context, plan and control processes, measure results and improve, with optional certification by an independent certification body.
Use · Reach for it when customers or regulators expect a certified quality system, or to give quality one common structure across sites. Certification proves the system exists, not that every product is good.
Governs · Quality,Manufacturing Quality & Compliance
Related · ISO 14001,ISO 45001
Official page ↗
FW-140
ISO/IEC 27001
Standard
ISO/IEC
The international standard for an information security management system. It sets requirements for scoping, risk assessment and treatment, leadership and continual improvement, with an annex of controls; the current edition is from 2022 and organizations can be certified against it.
Use · Use it when customers or regulators expect certified security management. Certification proves a managed process, not a secure architecture, and the scope statement decides how much it covers.
Governs · Security Governance & Risk
Related · NIST Cybersecurity Framework,ISO/IEC 42001,COBIT
Official page ↗
FW-280
ISO/IEC 42001
Standard
ISO/IEC
The international standard, published in 2023, for an artificial intelligence management system. It applies the familiar management-system structure of policy, risk, objectives, operation and improvement to the responsible development and use of AI, and supports certification.
Use · Use it when an organization must show auditors or customers that its AI use is governed. Like other management system standards it proves a process exists; it does not make a given model safe.
Governs · AI Strategy & Governance
Related · NIST AI Risk Management Framework,ISO/IEC 27001
Official page ↗
FW-110
ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010
Standard
ISO/IEC/IEEE
The international standard for architecture description. It defines how stakeholders, concerns, viewpoints, views, model kinds and correspondences relate, so any framework or notation can be described and compared on the same terms. The current edition is from 2022.
Use · Reach for it when designing an architecture description practice or judging whether a framework covers your stakeholders' concerns. It prescribes no particular views, notation or method.
Governs · Enterprise Architecture
Terms · Viewpoint,Enterprise Architecture
Related · TOGAF Standard,ArchiMate,Zachman Framework,arc42
Official page ↗
FW-180
IT4IT
Reference Model
The Open Group
A reference architecture for running the IT function as a business, organized around value streams from strategy to portfolio, requirement to deploy, request to fulfill and detect to correct, with the functional components and data objects each one needs.
Use · Use it to rationalize the toolchain that IT uses to manage itself and to check that the data linking those tools is defined. It is a reference, not an implementation guide, and adoption beyond large IT shops is limited.
Governs · Technology Strategy & Operating Model,IT Service Management
Terms · Value Stream,Reference Model
Related · TOGAF Standard,ITIL,ServiceNow Common Service Data Model (CSDM)
Official page ↗
FW-050
ITIL
Framework
PeopleCert
A body of guidance for managing IT-enabled services, organized in ITIL 4 as a service value system with practices such as incident, change enablement and service configuration management. PeopleCert is releasing a successor, ITIL (Version 5), in phases, and ITIL 4 remains available alongside it.
Use · Use it to agree on service management terms and practice boundaries with operations teams. It describes good practice, not a data model or a tool design; mapping its practices onto a platform is still your work.
Governs · IT Service Management
Terms · CMDB,Configuration Item,Business Service,Service Offering,Service Portfolio
Related · COBIT,ServiceNow Common Service Data Model (CSDM),IT4IT
Official page ↗
FW-380
NERC Reliability Standards
Standard
North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)
The mandatory reliability standards for the North American bulk power system, enforceable in the United States since 2007, grouped in families covering balancing, operations, planning, protection, emergency operations and critical infrastructure protection.
Use · Use it to know which obligations follow from each function a utility is registered for and to organize evidence and audits. It governs the bulk power system; distribution-only work is mostly outside it.
Governs · Covered Asset Categorization,Reliability Standard Evidence,Standards Audit & Self-Report,Registered Function Inventory,Transmission System Operations,Transmission Reliability Planning
Related · IEC Common Information Model (CIM)
Official page ↗
FW-270
NIST AI Risk Management Framework
Framework
NIST
A voluntary framework, first released in January 2023, for managing the risks of AI systems across their life cycle. Its four functions, Govern, Map, Measure and Manage, describe outcomes for trustworthy AI, and companion profiles adapt it to settings such as generative AI.
Use · Reach for it to structure AI governance and risk review for models and AI-enabled products. It is not certifiable and leaves control design and metrics to the adopter.
Governs · AI Strategy & Governance
Related · ISO/IEC 42001,NIST Cybersecurity Framework
Official page ↗
FW-130
NIST Cybersecurity Framework
Framework
NIST
A voluntary framework for managing cybersecurity risk, organized in CSF 2.0 (released 2024) around six functions: Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover, each broken into categories and outcomes that organizations profile against their current and target state.
Use · Reach for it to frame a security program and gaps in terms leadership can follow. It describes outcomes, not controls or architecture; pair it with a control catalog and your own reference designs.
Governs · Cybersecurity
Terms · Current State,Target State,Gap Analysis
Related · ISO/IEC 27001,COBIT,NIST AI Risk Management Framework
Official page ↗
FW-250
OpenAPI Specification
Standard
OpenAPI Initiative
A machine-readable, language-neutral format for describing HTTP APIs: paths, operations, parameters, request and response schemas and security schemes. A description can drive documentation, client and server code, mocks and contract tests.
Use · Use it as the contract for any request-response HTTP API, ideally written before the code. It does not cover event or message interfaces, and a description that drifts from the implementation is worse than none.
Governs · Integration & API Delivery,API Design & Governance
Terms · API,Integration Pattern
Related · AsyncAPI
Official page ↗
FW-460
PCI DSS
Standard
PCI Security Standards Council
The security standard for any organization that stores, processes or transmits payment card account data, set by an industry council founded by the major card brands. It groups detailed technical and operational requirements under goals such as securing networks, protecting stored data, controlling access and testing regularly.
Use · Use it to scope and secure the systems that touch card data and to plan assessments. Reducing the scope with tokenization and segmentation is usually cheaper than securing everything to its bar; compliance is assessed at a point in time and does not prove the environment stays secure.
Governs · Card Issuing & Processing,Merchant Acquiring,Payment Disputes & Chargebacks,Customer Payment Acceptance
Related · ISO/IEC 27001,NIST Cybersecurity Framework
Official page ↗
FW-410
RM-ODP
Standard
ISO/IEC JTC 1
A reference model for describing distributed systems from five viewpoints (enterprise, information, computational, engineering and technology), each with its own concepts, plus rules that keep the viewpoints consistent with one another.
Use · Worth knowing as the origin of viewpoint-based architecture description that later standards built on. Few teams model in it directly; its value is the discipline of separating concerns by viewpoint.
Governs · Application & Technology Architecture,Solution Architecture
Terms · Viewpoint,Architecture Description Language
Related · ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010,ArchiMate
Official page ↗
FW-160
SAFe
Framework
Scaled Agile
The Scaled Agile Framework, a prescriptive model for running many agile teams as trains aligned to value streams, with planning increments, portfolio management and defined roles from team to enterprise level. Version 6.0 is current.
Use · Use it when an organization wants a ready-made operating model for large-scale agile delivery. It brings many roles and ceremonies; applied by rote it can add coordination overhead instead of removing dependencies.
Governs · Portfolio Planning & Balancing,Delivery Governance,Release & Deployment
Terms · Value Stream,Operating Model
Related · Team Topologies,IT4IT
Official page ↗
FW-070
ServiceNow Common Service Data Model (CSDM)
Reference Model
ServiceNow
A prescriptive data model for the ServiceNow platform that says which CMDB classes and relationships to use for business capabilities, Business Applications, Business, Technical and Application Services, Service Offerings and the infrastructure beneath them, so products on the platform read the same service data.
Use · Use it to structure a ServiceNow CMDB so service, change, risk and portfolio work share one model. It is specific to ServiceNow and gives no help with deciding what your services are; that remains a design task.
Governs · Configuration Management & CMDB,Application & Technology Architecture
Terms · CMDB,Configuration Item,Business Application,Application Service,Business Service,Technology Management Service,Service Offering,Information Object,Service Portfolio,Business Capability
Related · ITIL,IT4IT,TBM Taxonomy
Official page ↗
FW-400
SysML
Notation
Object Management Group
A modeling language for systems engineering that describes a system's requirements, structure, behavior and constraints in one model, so hardware, software and physical parts can be analyzed and traced together. Version 2 is a substantial redesign with a textual notation and a standard API.
Use · Reach for it when designing engineered products or cyber-physical systems where requirements must trace to physical parts. It is heavier than enterprise architecture needs; use ArchiMate for the enterprise view.
Governs · Product Design,Requirements & Product Definition
Terms · Architecture Description Language
Related · UML,ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010,ArchiMate
Official page ↗
FW-170
TBM Taxonomy
Reference Model
TBM Council
A standard classification for technology spend that rolls costs from general ledger and cost pools through IT towers to solutions and business consumers, so technology cost can be compared, allocated and discussed in business terms.
Use · Reach for it when building cost transparency, showback or application total cost of ownership. Its value depends on clean financial and asset data; the taxonomy alone does not produce credible numbers.
Governs · Technology Financial Management
Terms · Total Cost of Ownership,Application Portfolio
Related · FinOps Framework,ServiceNow Common Service Data Model (CSDM)
Official page ↗
FW-230
Team Topologies
Method
Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
An approach to organizing technology teams for fast flow, built on four team types (stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem) and three interaction modes (collaboration, X-as-a-Service and facilitating), with cognitive load as the main sizing constraint.
Use · Reach for it when architecture and team boundaries disagree and delivery stalls on hand-offs. It shapes team design; it does not settle funding, reporting lines or the software boundaries themselves.
Governs · Technology Strategy & Operating Model,Platform Engineering
Terms · Platform Engineering,Bounded Context
Related · SAFe,Wardley Mapping
Official page ↗
FW-300
TM Forum Business Process Framework (eTOM)
Reference Model
TM Forum
A hierarchical process reference model for communications service providers covering strategy, operations and enterprise management, from customer and product through service and resource to partner, part of TM Forum's wider set of telecom architecture standards.
Use · Use it to structure process and application architecture in a telecom operator and to talk with vendors who map to it. Outside communications it fits poorly, and its depth needs tailoring.
Governs · Subscriber Order & Activation,Network Operations & Assurance,Usage Charging & Subscriber Billing
Terms · Business Process,Reference Model
Related · APQC Process Classification Framework
Official page ↗
FW-010
TOGAF Standard
Framework
The Open Group
A broad enterprise architecture framework built around the Architecture Development Method, a repeatable cycle for moving from vision through business, data, application and technology architecture to migration planning and governance. The 10th Edition splits a stable core from a growing library of series guides.
Use · Reach for it to give an architecture practice a shared vocabulary, phases and deliverables. It is a toolkit to tailor, not a recipe; adopted whole, it produces documents faster than decisions.
Governs · Enterprise Architecture
Terms · Enterprise Architecture,Current State,Target State,Gap Analysis,Architecture Principle,Architecture Repository,Building Block
Related · ArchiMate,Zachman Framework,ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010,IT4IT
Official page ↗
FW-100
UML
Notation
Object Management Group
The Unified Modeling Language, a general-purpose family of structural and behavioral diagrams for software systems, including class, sequence, component, state and deployment diagrams. Version 2.5.1 is the current specification.
Use · Use sequence, state and class diagrams where precision helps a design conversation. Full UML is rarely kept in sync with code, so treat diagrams as explanation rather than a model to maintain.
Governs · Solution Design
Related · BPMN,C4 Model,ArchiMate
Official page ↗
FW-240
Wardley Mapping
Method
Simon Wardley
A strategy technique that maps the components needed to meet a user need along a value chain, positioned by how evolved each one is from genesis through custom-built and product to commodity, so movement and options become visible.
Use · Use it to decide what to build, buy or rent and where to expect change. Maps are judgments made visible; they are only as good as the discussion behind them and do not produce plans by themselves.
Governs · Strategic Analysis & Scenarios
Terms · Roadmap
Related · Team Topologies
Official page ↗
FW-030
Zachman Framework
Framework
Zachman International
A two-dimensional classification scheme for describing an enterprise: columns ask what, how, where, who, when and why, and rows take the perspective of planner, owner, designer, builder and implementer. Each cell holds a distinct kind of description.
Use · Useful as a completeness check on what an architecture repository holds and for whom. It names the artifacts but gives no method for producing them or sequencing the work.
Governs · Enterprise Architecture
Terms · Enterprise Architecture,Viewpoint
Related · TOGAF Standard,ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010
Official page ↗

Frameworks

Frameworks

ACORD Standards

APQC Process Classification Framework

arc42

ArchiMate

AsyncAPI

AWS Well-Architected Framework

Azure Well-Architected Framework

BCBS 239

BIAN

BIZBOK Guide

BPMN

C4 Model

CALM

COBIT

DAMA-DMBOK

Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework

FinOps Framework

Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework

IEC Common Information Model (CIM)

ISA-95

ISO 14001

ISO 20022

ISO 22301

ISO 45001

ISO 55000

ISO 9001

ISO/IEC 27001

ISO/IEC 42001

ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010

IT4IT

ITIL

NERC Reliability Standards

NIST AI Risk Management Framework

NIST Cybersecurity Framework

OpenAPI Specification

PCI DSS

RM-ODP

SAFe

ServiceNow Common Service Data Model (CSDM)

SysML

TBM Taxonomy

Team Topologies

TM Forum Business Process Framework (eTOM)

TOGAF Standard

UML

Wardley Mapping

Zachman Framework