ArchiMate layered view template
Business, application and technology, two elements each, with the serving and assignment relationships that actually cross between the layers already drawn.
Notation: ArchiMate 4Diagram: Layered view
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Open this templateWhat is on this diagram
- Customer
- A business actor. Yellow because it is the business layer.
- Order handling
- The business process. What the organization actually does.
- Order management
- An application service: what software offers the business.
- Ordering application
- The component that realizes that service.
- Database service
- A technology service, offered up to the application layer.
- Application server
- The node it runs on. Where the diagram touches hardware.
How to make it yours
- Keep the three rows as rows. A layered view whose elements drift between bands stops being one.
- Name the business process as a verb phrase and the services as nouns - that difference is the point.
- Draw serving upward only. A technology element serving a business process directly skips a layer you own.
- Use assignment for 'this performs that' and serving for 'this is offered to that'. Nothing else crosses layers.
- Add motivation elements in a separate view. Mixing them in is what makes a layered view unreadable.
Common questions
What is a layered view in ArchiMate?
A view that shows business, application and technology elements together with the relationships that cross between them. It is the view most stakeholders ask for by default, because it is the only one that answers what supports what without naming a single technology detail.
Which relationship connects layers in ArchiMate?
Serving, drawn as an open arrow pointing at the element being served, and it points upward: technology serves application, application serves business. Assignment stays within a layer and says which element performs the behaviour.
Do the ArchiMate layer colours mean anything?
They are conventional rather than mandated by the specification, but they are near-universal: yellow for business, blue for application, green for technology. Keeping them means anybody who has seen an ArchiMate model before can read your view without a legend.
Read the notation
What is ArchiMate
A working introduction to ArchiMate: what the language is for, the layer-and-aspect framework it is organised by, its element and relationship vocabulary, and when to reach for it instead of UML.
Layers and aspects
The ArchiMate framework in detail: business, application, technology, strategy, physical and implementation layers, the active-behaviour-passive aspects, and how the motivation elements cut across all of them.
Relationships
Every ArchiMate relationship explained: composition, aggregation, assignment, realization, serving, access, influence, triggering, flow, specialization and association - plus the strength order and how derived relationships work.
Viewpoints
How ArchiMate separates the model from the views onto it: what a viewpoint is, the standard set and what each is for, how to pick one for a stakeholder, and how to define your own without breaking the model.