ISO 15704 specifies a reference base of concepts and principles for enterprise architectures that enable enterprise development, enterprise integration, enterprise interoperability, human understanding and computer processing. ISO 15704 specifies requirements for models and languages created for expressing such enterprise architectures.
ISO 15704 specifies those terms, concepts and principles considered necessary to address stakeholder concerns and to carry out enterprise creation programmes as well as any incremental change projects required by the enterprise throughout the whole life of the enterprise. ISO 15704 forms the basis by which enterprise architecture and modelling standards can be developed or aligned.
Note 1: ISO 15704 does not define standard enterprises, standard organizational structures, standard enterprise processes, or standard enterprise data.
Note 2: ISO 15704 does not specify enterprise modelling processes.
ISO 15704 on requirements for enterprise-referencing is useful for:
ISO 15704 identifies an extensive collection of potential artefacts for expressing an enterprise referencing architecture and its associated methodologies. Not all of these artefacts will be applicable, necessary or even desirable for all architecting efforts. The identification of these artefacts assures that ISO 15704 meets the needs of the widest possible number of enterprise-referencing architecture and methodology situations. Users of ISO 15704 need to assess not only the value of generating an identified artefact but also the value of maintaining that artefact under the changing circumstances of the referenced enterprise. The requirements of the reference base for enterprise-referencing architecture and models in ISO 15704 allow assessment of an enterprise architecture framework or other approaches as well as associated methodology and languages for completeness with respect to the current and future purpose of the architecture effort. ISO 15704 will help guide development programmes. When conforming implementation designs have the same technology areas and nomenclature or can map to them readily, the information from one enterprise or process is more readily sharable with information of another enterprise or process.
The benefit will be most relevant to any group charged with improving an enterprise infrastructure or its processes. Such a group will find it necessary to either select or create a reference architecture of its own with terminology that pertains specifically to the company, industry, and culture involved. ISO 15704 will help guide that selection or creation. Industrial and information age enterprises create and modify manufacturing and business operations to improve performance in local and global markets. In operation, they deploy a variety of resources including people, information systems, automated machinery and business services. Individually and collectively these resources provide the functional capabilities required to perform the manufacturing and business processes and their constituent activities. The arrangement, targeting and interworking of resources need to accomplish the enterprise mission, which requires suitable business rules and organizational structures that enable the enterprise to provide products and services in conformance with agreed-upon criteria.
ISO 15704:2019 supersedes ISO 15704:2000, which is withdrawn. ISO 15704:2019 includes some technical changes with respect to ISO 15704:2000. These include:
ISO 15704