Architecture Management is one practice that you don't need to know in depth for the foundation level exam. But we at itil.diontraning.com, brought to you by Dion Training, do not want to leave any stone uncovered. So, here is an article that is going to cover it to give you a good general understanding of it.

The practice of architecture management is one that's focused on providing an understanding of all of the different elements that make up an organization and how those elements interrelate. This enables the organization to effectively achieve its current and future objectives. This provides your organization with the principles, standards, and tools that will enable you to manage complex changes in a much more structured and agile way.

There are five different types of architectures that you should consider inside your business. These are business architecture, service architecture, information systems architecture, technology architecture, and environmental architecture. Business architecture allows an organization to look at its capabilities to determine how they align with the different activities that are required for that business to co-create value for its customers.

Service architecture is going to give the organization a view of its services and their interactions to better understand how they are all going to interrelate and tie together. This usually results in a service model being created and this can act as a template or a blueprint for multiple services across the organization.

For information systems architecture, you're focused on the logical and physical data assets of the organization, and how they are managed and shared to benefit your overall goals.

The technology architecture is going to find the software and the hardware infrastructure that's needed to support the portfolio of services and the products your organization offers. For example, to answer the question of whether you should use a self-hosted configuration for your web servers or if you should rely on a cloud-based architecture, would fall under this technology architecture umbrella.

Finally, environmental architecture is used to describe the external factors that affect and impact your organization. If you can search for one of our articles here at itil.diontraining.com discussing PESTLE, this model would fall under the environmental architecture, since it contains things such as political, environmental, social, technological factors. All of those are external to your organization, so they are considered environmental.