Definitions Part 2 Flashcards
Building Block
Building Block
Represents a (potentially re-usable) component of business, IT, or architectural capability that can be combined with other building blocks to deliver architectures and solutions.
Building blocks can be defined at various levels of detail, depending on what stage of architecture development has been reached. For instance, at an early stage, a building block can simply consist of a name or an outline description. Later on, a building block may be decomposed into multiple supporting building blocks and may be accompanied by a full specification. Building blocks can relate to ‘‘architectures’’ or ‘‘solutions’’.
Business Architecture
Business Architecture
A description of the structure and interaction between the business strategy, organization, functions, business processes, and information needs.
Business Governance
Business Governance
Concerned with ensuring that the business processes and policies (and their operation) deliver the business outcomes and adhere to relevant business regulation.
Capability
Capability
An ability that an organization, person, or system possesses.
Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of organization, people, processes, and technology to achieve. For example, marketing, customer contact, or outbound telemarketing.
Concerns
Concerns
The key interests that are crucially important to the stakeholders in a system, and determine the acceptability of the system.
Concerns may pertain to any aspect of the system’s functioning, development, or operation, including considerations such as performance, reliability, security, distribution, and evolvability.
Constraint
Constraint
An external factor that prevents an organization from pursuing particular approaches to meet its goals.
For example, customer data is not harmonized within the organization, regionally or nationally, constraining the organization’s ability to offer effective customer service.
Data Architecture
Data Architecture
A description of the structure and interaction of the enterprise’s major types and sources of data, logical data assets, physical data assets, and data management resources.
Deliverable
Deliverable
An architectural work product that is contractually specified and in turn formally reviewed, agreed, and signed off by the stakeholders.
Deliverables represent the output of projects and those deliverables that are in documentation form will typically be archived at completion of a project, or transitioned into an Architecture Repository as a reference model, standard, or snapshot of the Architecture Landscape at a point in time.
Enterprise
Enterprise
The highest level (typically) of description of an organization and typically covers all missions and functions.
An enterprise will often span multiple organizations.
Foundation Architecture
Foundation Architecture
Generic building blocks, their inter-relationships with other building blocks, combined with the principles and guidelines that provide a foundation on which more specific architectures can be built.
An artifact
An artifact is a more granular architectural work product that describes an architecture from a specific viewpoint.
Examples include a network diagram, a server specification, a use-case specification, a list of architectural requirements, and a business interaction matrix. Artifacts are generally classified as catalogs (lists of things), matrices (showing relationships between things), and diagrams (pictures of things). An architectural deliverable may contain many artifacts and artifacts will form the content of the Architecture Repository
Reference Model (RM)
An abstract framework for understanding significant relationships among the entities of [an] environment, and for the development of consistent standards or specifications supporting that environment.
