Objective of Meeting
- Bring the members together and share Forum updates, including an Architecture Officers update to the membership, Forum Charter workshop, and Working Group updates
- Open discussion on the update to the Architecture Forum Charter, making sure it will reflect what members need and how the Forum should work in the future
- Share progress updates and topic ideas from the Working Groups, Member discussions, future contributions, and alignment
- Look at new and emerging topics, especially how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data sharing can be used in areas like transportation
Summary
The Architecture Forum Charter Discussion
The discussion focused on evolving the Architecture Forum Charter to better reflect current challenges and motivations. There was strong agreement that AI should be considered as part of standards development, potentially underpinning Forum activities to improve harmonization, reduce barriers, and support participation. Members highlighted fragmentation and boundaries (across Work Groups, Forums, membership tiers, and costs) as key obstacles to contribution.
The Charter should be architect-centric rather than standard-centric, broad in scope, and cover areas such as development, potentially include elements of certification (although not all agreed on this), and tooling.
There is currently low engagement with existing structures (e.g., PAG) and limited clarity on product roadmaps or how to get involved, reducing motivation to contribute. Many members are primarily consumers of stable standards and see little immediate need to engage. Peer recognition, open standards, and knowledge exchange being the main motivators for those who do participate.
Overall, the Enterprise Architecture environment has changed somewhat, and the Charter needs to reflect in more detail openness, Boundaryless Information Flow™, and safeguards for standards, ensuring wider contribution to development, review, and contribution.
Working Group Updates
There were detailed presentations and active discussion on the following topics:
- The Open Agile Architecture™ Standard
- Information Architecture and Data Modeling
- AI
- Transportation Architecture
- Data Integration Architecture
- Semantic Interoperability
- Ecosystems Architecture
Outputs
- Shared awareness and alignment across Working Groups
- Greater trust in the integrity of the output of content recognition of key member motivations; namely, peer recognition, open standards, and knowledge sharing, which should be explicitly supported by the Charter
- AI should play a supporting role in standards development and Forum operations to improve alignment, participation, and efficiency
Next Steps
- Continue with the development and update of the charter and ways of working
- Work on an Action Plan for the identified outputs and circulate to the membership
Links
Presentations published in the Architecture Forum Plato Page for access to the memberships.