A company that decided to design and implement an enterprise architecture may not want to start from scratch. TOGAF provides a framework with methods and tools to develop a broad range of different architectures.

Since the 90's TOGAF has been developed and especially in the last five years it has been adopted by many major companies worldwide.

Originally it was based on the Technical Architecture Framework for Information Management (TAFIM) developed by the US Department of Defense. The Architecture Forum Open Group got the permission to create TOGAF using TAFIM as a basis.

As typical for architecture frameworks TOGAF deals with four main architecture types.

The business architecture - it deals mainly with the general business strategy and governance of an organization. This part has been more emphasized in the latest release TOGAF 9.

The application architecture - a blueprint for application systems that will be deployed defines the relation to business processes in an organization.

The data architecture should provide a structure of any kind of data assets.

Responsible for an improved IT infrastructure is the technical architecture it should support the deployment of any kind of services related to hardware and software.