There really has never been a better time to get into Enterprise Architecture as the global economic downturn means that smart companies will be looking at making efficiency savings through strategic implementations and process streamlining, identification of function duplication and better IT/business alignment. Enterprise Architecture is a hard thing to get off the ground so why try and re-invent the wheel and benefit from the experiences of others in many different organisations. Using a framework can help and this is what TOGAF is.
TOGAF is one of the most popular Enterprise Architecture frameworks for many different reasons and justifies a post on it's own. The latest version is an incremental step in it's evolution. Seemingly the Open Group have avoided far-reaching changes seen in previous versions and mainly sticking to enhancements and bringing other areas right uptodate.
In our organisation we have spend a great deal of time and effort working out our own metamodel that shows the independent relationships between business process, application, data and technology. Working this out can help in understanding the knock-on effects of changes implement any sort of change.
What I found particularly please was this metamodel does look very close to ours and show some things that we haven't considered so I'm very much looking forward to Enterprise Architecture software like CaseWise and Telelogic/IBM System Architect having these metamodel templates.
TOGAF's ADM now has additional guidance that will make developers cheer! As it has support for iterations so the ADM can be mapped to Agile development techniques such as XP.
Also additionally the ADM has guidance on
Applying different enterprise levels
Security architecture
Defining SOA governance
These are just a couple of things I've picked up on, I'm sure as I pick though there will be more that I will comment on, anyway the download is free so well worth having a look through whether and Enterprise Architect or not.