Enterprise architecture (EA) is a term related to the practice of modeling the elements of business strategies, business processes and supporting technologies, and policies and infrastructures that make up an enterprise. Its role is to provide support for decision-making in the enterprise strategy. The architecture is also used as an analysis tool to develop new capabilities and structure organizations and to optimize processes and spending. This is typically what the HOPEX Modeling tool helps to do. Regardless of the modeling tool used, a set of frameworks have been designed to be used either as guidelines to implement enterprise architecture projects (for example, TOGAF) or to define the deliverables expected as a result of such projects. This is the case of NAF.

The NATO Architecture Framework (NAF) is not an enterprise architecture. NAF provides the rules, guidelines and product descriptions that define a standard way of developing, organizing and presenting enterprise architecture. It also provides guidelines on how to describe communication and information systems. When this framework is applied, architectures are able to effectively contribute to the acquisition and fielding of cost-effective and interoperable military capabilities. The framework ensures that architectures developed by NATO and its member countries can be compared and related across NATO and National boundaries. NATO common funded programs are to comply with the NAF to promote systems interoperability

Bearing all this in mind, a NAF implementation tool should be able to generate standardized documents that deal with enterprise architectures and that support the search for sponsorship and funding of major mission-oriented systems.

The framework details all the views addressing the different aspects of enterprise architectures (the overall purpose, the operational perspective, the system perspective and the technical perspective).

The HOPEX NAF is designed to generate NAF deliverables. It is based on the standard features of the HOPEX Modeling tool, however, dedicated features have been introduced to guide the NAF expert to use the product with the vocabulary with which he/she is accustomed.

The HOPEX NAF is based on the NAF v.3 release.

The present guide details how all views defined in the NAF standard are implemented in the HOPEX NAF product.