TOGAF® 10: what actually changed, and what it means on Monday morning

The most useful way to read the 10th Edition is not as a rewrite of the Architecture Development Method. The method is recognisably the method. What changed is the packaging around it, and the packaging turns out to matter more than people expected.

Modularity

The standard is now published as a set of parts rather than as one continuous document: the fundamental content that does not change, and a body of guidance that can be extended and updated without reissuing everything. If you have ever had to explain to a steering group why your architecture practice follows about forty per cent of a framework, this is the edition that stops making you sound evasive.

The guidance is where the work is

Series guides cover applying the method in specific situations: security architecture, business architecture, the architecture landscape, and organisation-specific adaptation of the framework itself. This is the material that answers the question every experienced architect asks in week one, which is "yes, but how do I use this here?"

Business architecture gets more room

The business architecture material has grown, and it reflects how the discipline is actually practised now: capabilities, value streams, information mapping and organisation mapping, treated as first-class concerns rather than as a preamble to the interesting IT work.

Which edition should you certify against?

The 10th Edition, and that is worth saying plainly because it affects what you should book. It is the current standard, it is what The Open Group examines against, and it is what our Foundation and Practitioner course is taught to. If an internal standard or a job specification at your end still names an older edition, tell us when you enquire and we will say plainly what that means for the certificate you end up holding.

If you are starting fresh, or your standards are being rewritten anyway, go to the current edition.