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Abstract ANSI/IEEE Standard 1471‐2000 is the Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software‐Intensive Systems, developed by the IEEE's Architecture Working Group (AWG) under the sponsorship of the Software Engineering Standards Committee of IEEE. ANSI/IEEE 1471‐2000 is the first formal standard to address the content and organization of architectural descriptions. [A wide variety of architecture frameworks exist as de facto standards in particular communities, but ANSI/IEEE 1471 is the first formal standard in the sense of being a product formally approved by a recognized standards body.] The standard defines the structure and content of an Architectural Description (AD) and incorporates a broad consensus on best practices for such descriptions. Although ANSI/IEEE 1471‐2000 was conceived as a software‐focused standard, this article argues that it is equally applicable to any system; hence appropriate for use as a part of systems engineering to describe system architectures. This article reviews the concepts of ANSI/IEEE 1471‐2000, the rationale for their selection, and demonstrates its application in systems engineering. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 7: 257–270, 2004