Module 8 — Reading ArchiMate

Theory 20 minutes + Workshop 60 minutes

Duration: 80 minutes. Artefact produced: ArchiMate reading assessment.

What you will learn

Read layers

Recognise business, application, technology, strategy, and implementation layers.

Read relationships

Interpret flow, serving, assignment, composition, realisation, and access relationships.

Find the message

Explain what a view is trying to communicate without getting lost in notation.

Challenge quality

Identify diagrams that are too crowded, unclear, or unsupported by decisions.

ArchiMate is a language, not decoration

ArchiMate gives architects a structured language for describing how business, application, technology, and implementation concepts relate. The goal is not to memorise every symbol. The goal is to read views well enough to understand intent, dependency, ownership, and impact.

Read before you draw

Review an architecture view and identify the business capability, application services, technology services, dependencies, and transition concerns it communicates.

Workshop task

Annotate an ArchiMate-style view with its key message, elements, relationships, risks, and missing information.

Assessment prompt

Explain the architecture story shown by the view in plain business language.

What to submit

Annotated view; relationship notes; plain-language summary; quality assessment.

Next module

Module 9 — Current and Target Architecture Views.