Roger Evernden discusses the mantra that TOGAF must be adapted and customized to meet your practices needs; not just once, but every time you use it.

If there is one mantra that gets repeated throughout the TOGAF documentation it is that TOGAF needs to be adapted to meet your needs, and that doesn’t necessarily mean adapting it once to meet your overall needs! The Open Group make it quite clear that you might need to adapt TOGAF every time you use it.

There are some guidelines in the TOGAF documentation for adapting TOGAF, so in
this White Paper I am going to quickly point out the relevant sections, but then move
to provide a simple summary of how you might customize or simplify TOGAF to meet
your exact needs. [I’ve provided references to sections in the TOGAF documentation in
square brackets]

Here are the parts of the TOGAF documentation that cover tailoring the material
to your needs:

Let’s start with the Enterprise Continuum. Although this can seem confusing, the
Enterprise Continuum is simply a way of classifying any artifacts or resources that
might be useful. It also explains the overall process of customizing TOGAF to
your needs. If you think of the TOGAF documentation itself as being a Foundation
Architecture body of knowledge (which is at the left hand side of the continuum),
then anything in TOGAF might need to be adapted to meet your enterprisespecific
needs (at the right hand side of the continuum). TOGAF is generic – you
need a specific version of this to meet your needs.

As you can see from the references, the guidelines for adapting TOGAF to your needs
are strewn across several parts of the documentation. So let’s summarize this scattered
content into a more concise guide.

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