Standards Modeling

Standards are important specifications with which architectures should comply. They can be either organizational standards (internal to the organization), Industry Standards (governed by Industry bodies) or Regulatory Standards (mandated by international, national or jurisdictional law). All of these standards must be represented in the Architecture Repository and mapped to applicable parts of the architecture to indicate compliance or dispensation. The standards can be categorized further by architecture domain: Business, Information, Application and Technology standards. The process of standards adoption must be managed to show how the standards move through a lifecycle from selection to adoption and eventual retirement.

Enterprise Architect has a number of tools and mechanisms for modeling standards. The most important of these are the Artifact and Document Artifact, which can be used to model External and Internal standards respectively. The Artifact can be used as a surrogate for an external standard inside the model, which provides the advantage of being able to create a hyperlink to the external standard but also being able to relate the Artifact to elements that form part of one or more architectures. The Document Artifact is a word processing document that can be used to create and manage standards inside the repository. It can be created using system or user defined templates, and can be related to elements that form part of one or more architectures.

This section lists the main tools available in Enterprise Architect that can be used to perform Standards Modeling. There is also a wide range of additional tools that a modeler might find suitable when applying the technique in a particular context. The complete list of tools is available from the topics: Meet the Enterprise Architecture Tools and Additional Enterprise Architecture Tools.

Artifact

An Artifact can be used as a placeholder for an external standard such as a regulatory or Industry standard that is governed and stored in a remote location. The Artifact element can be hyper-linked to the external standard regardless of whether if is accessible as a file or a Web Page. This mechanism allows it to be launched from within Enterprise Architect. This provides a convenient way to reference standards as the element can be dropped from the Standards Packages onto a diagram and related to elements to indicate compliance or that a dispensation has been granted.

Learn More: Artifact

Document Artifact

A Document Artifact can be used to create a standard, conveniently storing the document inside the repository. A template could be specified for the document, which could be reused for other standards initiatives. This provides a convenient way to reference standards as the element can be dropped from the Standards Packages onto diagram and related to elements to indicate compliance or that a dispensation has been granted.

Learn More: Document Artifact

Documentation

Enterprise Architect has a powerful and flexible documentation generator that can produce Docx and RTF Word Processor files, PDF and HTML reports. A single standard or group of standards could be generated directly from Enterprise Architect incorporating diagrams matrices and other artifacts into the document from the repository. This is useful when the Standards need to be provided to an external body such as an implementation partner.

Learn More: Documentation