Business Architecture Glossary

1. Business Architecture: A blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands.
2. Enterprise Architecture (EA): The process of defining the structure and operation of an organization through establishing its business, application, data, and technology layers.
3. Value Stream: The sequence of activities an organization undertakes to deliver a product or service to its customers.
4. Capability Mapping: A visual depiction of an organization’s abilities to execute required activities.
5. Stakeholder: Anyone interested in the business or will be affected by its decisions.
6. Business Model: A conceptual structure that supports the viability of a company and explains how it operates, makes money, and how it intends to achieve its goals.
7. Strategy: A high-level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty.
8. Governance: The management framework within which project decisions are made.
9. Vision: The aspirational description of what an organization wants to achieve in the mid-term or long-term.
10. Mission: A written declaration of an organization’s core purpose and focus.
11. Operational Efficiency: Performing business activities with minimum waste and maximum productivity.
12. Portfolio Management: The centralized management of processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and manage current or proposed projects.
13. Business Process: A collection of linked tasks which find their end in delivering a service or product to a client.
14. Information Architecture: A discipline and a design approach that focuses on the organization and structure of data.
15. Business Unit: A subset of the business that operates somewhat independently of the other segments within the company.
16. Program Management: The coordinated management of related projects may include using portfolio management techniques to manage related projects as a group.
17. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): A style of software design where services are provided to the other components by application components through a communication protocol over a network.
18. Maturity Model: A tool that helps people assess a person’s or group’s current effectiveness and supports figuring out what capabilities they need to acquire next to improve their performance.
19. Change Management: The discipline that guides how we prepare, equip, and support individuals to adopt change to successfully drive organizational success and outcomes.
20. Business Case: Justification for undertaking a project or program, typically linked to the anticipated benefits to be gained and the strategic alignment.
21. Business Function: The broad business activities performed in an organization can be broken down into specific processes.
22. Key Performance Indicator (KPI): A type of performance measurement that evaluates an organization’s success or a particular activity in which it engages.
23. Benchmarking: Comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests or best practices from other companies.
24. Project Management Office (PMO): A group or department within a business, agency or enterprise that defines and maintains standards for project management within the organization.
25. Business Process Reengineering (BPR): Analyzing and redesign workflows within and between enterprises to optimize end-to-end processes and automate non-value-added tasks.
26. Balanced Scorecard: A strategic planning and management system used to align business activities to the vision statement of an organization.
27. SWOT Analysis: A strategic planning technique used to help a person or organization identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
28. Resource Allocation: The assignment of available resources to various uses in the organization or the process of distributing resources among the different projects or business units.
29. Value Proposition: A promise of value to be delivered, communicated, and acknowledged. It’s also a belief from the customer about how value will be delivered, experienced, and acquired.
30. Supply Chain: The network of all the individuals, organizations, resources, activities and technology involved in the creation and sale of a product.
31. Business Intelligence (BI): A technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable information to help executives, managers, and other corporate end users make informed business decisions.
32. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): Business process management tools that can be used to manage information across an organization.
33. Customer Relationship Management (CRM): An approach to managing a company’s interaction with current and potential future customers.
34. Data Warehousing: The process of constructing and using data warehouses for the purpose of data analysis and reporting.
35. Business Continuity Planning (BCP): The process involved in creating a system of prevention and recovery from potential threats to a company.
36. Risk Assessment: The identification and analysis of relevant risks to achieving objectives, followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability or impact of unfortunate events.
37. Business Process Management (BPM): The discipline involving any combination of modeling, automation, execution, control, measurement and optimization of business activity flows in support of enterprise goals.
38. Lean Management: A method of running an organization that supports the concept of continuous improvement, a long-term approach to work that systematically seeks to achieve small, incremental changes in processes to improve efficiency and quality.
39. Six Sigma: A set of techniques and tools for process improvement, originally developed by Motorola.
40. Total Quality Management (TQM): An approach that seeks to improve quality and performance which will meet or exceed customer expectations.
41. IT Service Management (ITSM): The activities that are performed by an organization to design, plan, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers.
42. Architecture Framework: A structure used to develop a broad range of different architectures. Examples include The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and the Zachman Framework.
43. Business-IT Alignment: The correspondence between an enterprise’s business objectives and the Information Technology (IT) requirements.
44. Data Governance: The overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of the data employed in an enterprise.
45. Business Rule: Defines or constrains some aspect of the business. It is intended to assert business structure or to control or influence the behavior of the business.
46. Gap Analysis: A method of assessing the differences in performance between a business’ information systems or software applications to determine whether business requirements are being met and, if not, what steps should be taken to ensure they are met successfully.
47. Business Entity: A very important business-focused concept used in business analysis to identify the things the business cares about.
48. Business Driver: The key inputs and activities that drive a business’s operational and financial results.
49. Scalability: The capability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate that growth.
50. Outsourcing: An agreement in which one company hires another company to be responsible for a planned or existing activity that is or could be done internally.
51. Offshoring: The practice of basing some of a company’s processes or services overseas so as to take advantage of lower costs.
52. Key Success Factor (KSF): An element that is necessary for an organization or project to achieve its mission.
53. Performance Metric: A measurable value demonstrating how effectively a company achieves key business objectives.
54. Cost-Benefit Analysis: A systematic approach to estimating the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives used to determine options that provide the best approach to achieving benefits while preserving savings.
55. Requirement: A singular documented physical and functional need that a particular design, product or process must be able to perform.
56. Stakeholder Analysis: An important technique for stakeholder identification and analyzing their needs. It is used to identify all key (primary and secondary) stakeholders who have a vested interest in the issues with which the project is concerned.
57. Agile Methodology: A type of project management process mainly used for software development, where demands and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers.
58. Business Analysis: The discipline of identifying business needs and determining solutions to business problems.
59. Solution Architecture: A detailed description of a software or system solution that addresses a business problem.
60. Functional Requirement: A type of requirement that states what a system must do.
61. Non-Functional Requirement: A requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system rather than specific behaviors.
62. Business Stakeholder: A person, group, or organization that has an interest or concern in an organization.
63. Process Owner: The person responsible for the performance of a process and ensures outcomes are achieved.
64. Business Ecosystem: The network of organizations – including suppliers, distributors, customers, competitors, government agencies and so on – involved in the delivery of a specific product or service through both competition and cooperation.
65. Competitive Advantage: An advantage over competitors gained by offering consumers greater value, either by means of lower prices or by providing greater benefits and service that justifies higher prices.
66. Digital Transformation: Integrating digital technology into all business areas fundamentally changes how you operate and deliver value to customers.
67. Technology Stack: The set of technologies, languages, and software products that are used to create a web or mobile application.
68. Cloud Computing: The delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.
69. Artificial Intelligence (AI): The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
70. Machine Learning (ML): AI application that allows systems to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed automatically.
71. Big Data: Extremely large data sets that may be analyzed comically to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions.
72. Internet of Things (IoT): The network of physical objects—“things”—that are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other devices and systems over the internet.
73. Microservices: A type of software architecture where large applications comprise small, self-contained units working together.
74. Business Operations: Activities involved in the business’s day-to-day functions are conducted to generate profits.
75. Scrum: A framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.
76. Kanban: A scheduling system for lean manufacturing and just-in-time manufacturing.
77. Value Chain: A set of activities a firm operating in a specific industry performs to deliver a valuable product for the market.
78. Core Competencies: A company’s unique capabilities that give it a competitive edge.
79. User Experience (UX): People’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service.
80. Customer Experience (CX): The product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship.
81. Customer Journey Map: A visual representation of every customer experience with you.
82. IT Infrastructure: The composite hardware, software, network resources and services required for the existence, operation and management of an enterprise IT environment.
83. Data Mining: The process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems.
84. Analytics: The systematic computational analysis of data or statistics.
85. Change Control: A systematic approach to managing all changes made to a product or system.
86. Workflow: The sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion.
87. Quality Assurance (QA): Any systematic process to ensure that the developed product or service meets specified requirements.
88. Quality Control (QC): The process by which entities review the quality of all factors involved in production.
89. DevOps: A set of practices that combines software development and IT operations. It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.
90. Business Requirement: A high-level need or expectation that is taken as a given for a given business strategy.
91. Technical Requirement: A requirement outlining how to build and implement the solution.
92. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO): A method of subcontracting various business-related operations to third-party vendors.
93. Software as a Service (SaaS): A software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted.
94. Platform as a Service (PaaS): A category of cloud computing services that allows customers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app.
95. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): A form of cloud computing that provides virtualized computing resources over the internet.
96. Return on Investment (ROI): A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or compare the efficiency of a number of different investments.
97. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): An asset’s purchase price plus operation costs.
98. Data Lake: A storage repository that holds a vast amount of raw data in its native format until it is needed.
99. Data Flow Diagram (DFD): A graphical representation of the “flow” of data through an information system, modeling its process aspects.
100. Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN): A graphical representation for specifying business processes in a business process model.