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Overview — What is ArcaMira?

ArcaMira is a living architecture repository for mid-market IT organizations. It lets your architecture team document what the organization has — applications, technologies, data, capabilities, initiatives — how those things connect, and what risks or changes are coming. Business stakeholders get clean, read-only views and summaries without needing to understand the underlying model.

Who it's for

Audience What they get
Enterprise / solution architects A repository to catalogue the estate, map it to capabilities, track lifecycle and risk, and govern change.
Architecture leadership / ARB Governance workflows (principles, standards, review/approval), portfolio health, and roadmap visibility.
Business stakeholders Read-only stakeholder summaries, capability maps, and roadmaps — no clutter, no editing controls.
Admins Multi-role user management, integrations (AWS / Azure / ServiceNow), tenant settings, and feature flags.

The core idea: start with what you have

Start with what you have, not what you should have.

You don't need a complete capability map or a perfectly structured metamodel before you get value. Import a spreadsheet of applications, add a few relationships, and the tool starts showing you something meaningful within an hour. Meaning is built up progressively — capability mapping, ownership, and risk are layered on at the team's own pace, often with AI assistance.

This matters because mid-market organizations typically know what they have (their applications, their vendors) long before they know what it's all for (which capabilities it serves). ArcaMira treats capability-mapping as a discovery journey, not a data-entry gate.

What ArcaMira deliberately is not

ArcaMira is calibrated for the mid-market and applies one consistent test to every feature:

Does this tell the user something true about their organization that nothing else could supply — or does it mainly teach them to speak a framework's vocabulary?

Things that pass — capabilities, applications, dependencies, redundancy, blast radius, lifecycle risk — are first-class. Framework-classification overlays that mostly re-label existing data don't ship at all (a Zachman Matrix overlay once existed and has been retired — see Architecture governance).

ArcaMira also stays on the EA side of the operational divide. It records an architect's judgement of business criticality and consumes lifecycle facts; it does not try to run a Business Impact Analysis, track incidents, or measure SLAs — those belong to operational tooling. (See Ownership & accountability for where that line sits.)

How the pieces fit

        Capabilities  ←—— the "why": what the business can do
             ▲
             │ realised by
             │
        Applications  ←—— the "what": the systems you run
             ▲
             │ run on
             │
        Technology    ←—— the "how": platforms, databases, languages
             │
        Data           ←—— what flows through it all
             │
        Governance     ←—— principles, standards, decisions, reviews
             │
        Planning       ←—— roadmap, initiatives, impact analysis, scenarios

Two spaces sit side by side: the Estate — the technical inventory you discover and run (applications, technology, data) — and the Business — the authored intent it serves (capabilities, and the services that are a capability's interface to the rest of the organisation). Applications in the estate are mapped to the capabilities they realise.

Everything is an entity; entities are joined by relationships; curated subsets are drawn as views. See Core concepts for the full model.

Where to go next