It’s that classic line from Monty Python’s film, “The Life of Brian”:
And I was thinking about how to answer this question if it was re-phrased as “What has Archi ever done for us?” or even, “What has Archi ever done for ArchiMate?”
Well.
I’m not going to presume anything about the global impact that Archi might have made during its 6 years existence, it might be better if its thousands of users attested to its apparent ubiquity, usefulness and popularity.
But, first, here’s a quote from an Enterprise Architect that someone sent me:
Archi does more to popularize the use of ArchiMate…In my practice as an EA I regularly encounter professionals who refer to Archi as ArchiMate. They are often quite stunned when I point out the difference.
It’s certainly true from my experience that very many people seem to think that Archi and ArchiMate are synonymous. I wouldn’t wish to perpetuate this misunderstanding and I do try to make clear the distinction between Archi® the tool and ArchiMate® the language (both are registered trademarks), but perhaps it’s a bit like the immediate association that we make with internet search and “Google” – “to Google”. The key is in strong branding, clear product and The Power of Pull.
We’re asking users to tell their stories here on this blog about how they use Archi and ArchiMate to model the enterprise, and there are many other stories being posted on-line, but for now I’ll provide some plain statistics. Here are the download figures for Archi as provided by Google Analytics for the Archi website from January 1 2014 up to yesterday (July 12 2016). Note that the Archi website only started to host the downloads from about January 2014 onwards, before that they were available from the old website.
And here’s the global picture of site access for the top 30 countries:
Adjusting for duplicates and other factors there seems to have been about 3,000 – 4,000 downloads a month of Archi. The Netherlands (the birthplace of ArchiMate) is top of the list in the countries league, followed by the United States and the UK. Russia comes in at 4th place, and I know for a fact that Archi is really popular there, since it has been translated into Russian.
So, what has Archi ever done for the global uptake of ArchiMate? Or, to put it another way, I wonder how popular ArchiMate would be now if, in a parallel universe, Archi had not existed.
I won’t answer that but I will say this – it’s probably a good idea to keep going with Archi.
What do you think?
