What is Northwise?

Northwise is an architecture practice platform for teams that take ArchiMate and TOGAF seriously. It gives architecture teams one place to document their landscape, govern their standards, run structured reviews, and — with Plumbline — continuously check whether delivery stays in line with what was decided.

The core promise: architecture isn't a document you publish and forget. It's a practice you run. Northwise makes that practice visible, traceable, and useful to the entire organisation.

The three modules

Landscape

Your Landscape is the full ArchiMate model of your enterprise: applications, technologies, actors, capabilities, business processes, and the relationships between them. Northwise stores every ArchiMate 3.x element type and every relationship type natively — not as tags, not as free-text fields, but as structured data.

When you import from an existing AMEFF file (the open standard for ArchiMate exchange), nothing is lost. When you create elements from scratch, you're building against the full metamodel.

Viewpoints let you slice that model for different audiences: a business sponsor sees business processes and capabilities, an infrastructure team sees deployment nodes and technology services.

Standards

Your Standards module is where the decisions that govern Landscape live. It has three parts:

• Principles — the rules your architecture obeys (e.g. "Applications must be stateless"). Principles have a rationale, implications, and a source (TOGAF-aligned).
• Technology Catalogue — every technology your estate uses, tagged with lifecycle stage (Trial → Adopt → Hold → Ban). Connected to your ArchiMate elements, so drift becomes visible.
• Architecture Decisions (ADRs) — the record of decisions made. Title, context, decision, consequences, status. Linked to the elements and requirements they affect.
• Deliverables — the 15 TOGAF-standard deliverable types (Architecture Vision, Solution Architecture, etc.) with version control.
• Requirements — architectural, functional, and non-functional requirements, linked to elements and initiatives.

Governance (Plumbline + Reviews)

Two complementary governance mechanisms:

• Reviews route decisions through the right people. A configurable Decision Matrix determines whether a change needs no review, a lightweight async approval, or a full board sign-off. Review cycles have status, ownership, comments, and an audit trail.
• Plumbline runs automated readiness assessments against your principles. It scores your architecture by section and surfaces findings when standards are violated. The optional AI-author can draft principle suggestions based on patterns it detects.

Key concepts

Tenant

A tenant is your organisation's workspace. All data — elements, principles, decisions, findings — lives within your tenant and is completely isolated from other tenants. You access Northwise at app.getnorthwise.com and your tenant is identified automatically after login.

System roles

Every user has exactly one system role:

| Role | What they can do | | --------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Super-admin | Platform maintenance only — not a regular user role | | Architect | Author canonical content: elements, principles, deliverables, decisions | | Contributor | Participate in reviews, raise findings, comment — but cannot author canonical content | | Reader | Read-only access to everything; always free |

See Understanding roles for a full breakdown.

Plans

Northwise has four plans: Free, Team, Business, Enterprise. The plan determines which features your tenant can access and how many seats of each type you can have.

See Understanding your plan for details.

What to do next

1. 1

   Sign up and log in for the first time — create your tenant and verify your email.

2. 2

   Invite your team — bring in the architects, contributors, and readers who will use the platform.

3. 3

   Follow Your first week — a guided sequence of actions that gets your practice running.