9.3 Architecture Skills Framework, Roles & Competency Levels
Key Takeaways
- The TOGAF Architecture Skills Framework provides a standard reference for defining architect roles, skill requirements, and professional career paths.
- TOGAF names seven skill categories: Generic Skills; Business Skills & Methods; Enterprise Architecture Skills; Program or Project Management Skills; IT General Knowledge Skills; Technical IT Skills; and Legal Environment.
- TOGAF defines four distinct competency levels: Background (1), Awareness (2), Knowledge (3), and Expert (4).
- Enterprise Architects focus on broad strategy, enterprise alignment, and multi-year roadmaps across the organization.
- Solution Architects operate at the project level, focusing on detailed solution design, technology selection, and execution within constrained scopes.
9.3 Architecture Skills Framework, Roles & Competency Levels
Building an effective enterprise architecture practice depends on human capability. Without skilled, knowledgeable, and business-savvy architects, enterprise governance tools and frameworks cannot deliver strategic outcomes. The TOGAF Architecture Skills Framework provides an open, adaptable reference model that organizations use to define architect roles, assess skills, structure training programs, and design career progression paths.
Purpose of the TOGAF Architecture Skills Framework
The primary objectives of the Architecture Skills Framework are to:
- Define Standard Architect Roles: Provide clear role definitions and responsibilities for various architectural disciplines.
- Establish Competency Baselines: Provide a transparent, measurable scale for assessing individual practitioner competencies.
- Guide Recruitment & Staffing: Enable HR and hiring managers to build accurate job descriptions and evaluation criteria.
- Support Professional Development: Identify skill gaps and outline structured training, mentoring, and certification roadmaps.
The Four TOGAF Competency Levels
TOGAF defines a four-tier competency scale to measure proficiency across any given skill area. This standardized scale allows organizations to map the required proficiency level for specific roles.
| Level | Competency Name | Description & Capability Expectation | Operational Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Background | Possesses basic, broad conceptual understanding. Understands fundamental terms and concepts but requires guidance. | A junior analyst who understands what cloud computing is conceptually but cannot design a migration strategy. |
| 2 | Awareness | Possesses sufficient understanding to recognize architectural issues, contribute to discussions, and ask probing questions. | A business architect who understands data governance concepts enough to evaluate data policy impacts. |
| 3 | Knowledge | Demonstrates detailed operational understanding. Can independently apply concepts, tools, and methods to deliver architectural artifacts. | A technology architect who designs end-to-end containerized deployment architectures without supervision. |
| 4 | Expert | Possesses extensive practical experience and deep expertise. Provides thought leadership, mentors others, and shapes enterprise strategy. | A Chief Enterprise Architect who authors enterprise principles, arbitrates complex disputes, and steers C-suite strategy. |
The Seven Skill Categories
To avoid over-indexing on pure IT technical skills, the TOGAF Architecture Skills Framework organizes the required team skill set into seven named categories. Get the names right — the framework is explicit about them, and paraphrases such as "Leadership Skills" or "Architecture Skills" are not the framework's vocabulary:
| # | Category | Typically Comprising |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Generic Skills | Leadership, teamworking, inter-personal skills, oral and written communication. |
| 2 | Business Skills & Methods | Enterprise organization knowledge, business cases, business process, strategic planning, financial and budget management. |
| 3 | Enterprise Architecture Skills | Modeling, building block design, application high-level design, role definition, architecture principle design, high-level migration planning, building-block management, systems integration. |
| 4 | Program or Project Management Skills | Managing business change, project management methods and tools, value management. |
| 5 | IT General Knowledge Skills | Brokering applications, asset management, IT system migration planning, service level agreements. |
| 6 | Technical IT Skills | Software engineering, security, compute and network infrastructure, data interchange, data management. |
| 7 | Legal Environment | Data protection and privacy law, contract law, procurement law, fraud and regulatory obligations. |
+--------------------------------------+
| TOGAF Architecture Skills Framework |
+--------------------------------------+
|
+--------+--------+--------+------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
| | | | | | | |
v v v v v v v
Generic Business Enterprise Program/ IT General Technical Legal
Skills Skills & Architecture Project Knowledge IT Skills Environment
Methods Skills Management Skills
The Legal Environment category is the one candidates most often forget, and it is the one that most often bites in practice: a data-residency clause or a procurement rule can invalidate an otherwise elegant target architecture.
Two framing points matter. First, the framework is descriptive, not prescriptive — organizations are expected to adapt the categories and the skills within them. Second, in the 10th Edition the Architecture Skills Framework is published as a TOGAF Series Guide in the TOGAF Library rather than as a chapter of the standard's Fundamental Content, and it is not examined in the OGEA-101 Foundation syllabus. It remains directly useful when you are staffing a real architecture practice.
Core Architectural Roles in the Enterprise
TOGAF defines multiple specialized roles within an enterprise architecture practice, separating broad strategic roles from specialized domain and project roles.
1. Enterprise Architect (EA)
- Focus & Scope: Broad, enterprise-wide scope spanning strategy, business, data, applications, and technology.
- Primary Responsibilities: Drives overall business-IT alignment, maintains the Target Enterprise Architecture, manages the Architecture Repository, chairs or advises the Architecture Board, and defines multi-year technology roadmaps.
2. Domain Architects
Domain architects specialize in specific BDAT architectural domains:
- Business Architect: Focuses on business strategy, capability mapping, value streams, organization structure, and business process transformation.
- Data / Information Architect: Focuses on enterprise data models, data lineage, data governance, master data management (MDM), and analytics pipelines.
- Application Architect: Focuses on application portfolio structure, API strategy, integration patterns, microservices architecture, and application lifecycle management.
- Technology Architect: Focuses on cloud infrastructure, compute/storage platforms, network topologies, middleware, and hardware baselines.
- Security Architect: Cross-cutting domain role focused on cybersecurity standards, identity & access management (IAM), zero-trust architecture, and regulatory compliance.
3. Solution Architect (SA)
- Focus & Scope: Narrow, project-specific scope focused on designing a concrete, end-to-end solution for a specific business initiative or application project.
- Primary Responsibilities: Translates enterprise architecture guidelines and requirements into detailed technical solution designs (Software Architecture & Systems Design), selects specific tools/frameworks, guides agile delivery squads, and ensures project compliance with EA standards.
Role Comparison: Enterprise Architect vs. Solution Architect
A critical distinction tested on TOGAF certification exams is the difference in scope, horizon, and focus between an Enterprise Architect and a Solution Architect.
| Comparison Dimension | Enterprise Architect (EA) | Solution Architect (SA) |
|---|---|---|
| Organizational Scope | Enterprise-wide, multi-division, or global ecosystem scope. | Single project, program, or product delivery scope. |
| Time Horizon | Multi-year strategic horizon (3 to 5+ years forward-looking). | Near-term tactical delivery horizon (6 to 18 months). |
| Primary Objective | Business strategic alignment, complexity reduction, standards governance. | Successful delivery of a functional, operational system satisfying project needs. |
| Level of Abstraction | High abstraction; focuses on capabilities, standards, and building blocks. | Low to moderate abstraction; focuses on concrete code, APIs, schemas, and components. |
| Governance Role | Establishes architecture standards, principles, and compliance review processes. | Conforms to enterprise standards, submits dispensation requests when necessary. |
Applying the Skills Framework
Organizations implement the TOGAF Architecture Skills Framework through a structured three-step process:
- Role Profiling: Mapping required competency levels (1-4) across the seven skill categories for every architect job title in the company.
- Capability Assessment: Evaluating current architect staff against role profiles to identify individual and organizational skill gaps.
- Development Roadmaps: Constructing targeted training programs, mentoring pairings, and project assignments to elevate team competency.
What is the highest level of proficiency defined in the TOGAF four-tier Competency Scale?
How does the scope and focus of an Enterprise Architect differ from that of a Solution Architect?
Which of the following is NOT one of the seven skill categories named in the TOGAF Architecture Skills Framework?