This page provides definitions for common terms used throughout the Disciplined Agile® (DA™) enterprise architecture process blade:
- Architecture owner. An architecture owner is a person on a disciplined agile delivery team who is responsible for facilitating architecture-level decisions, for mentoring and coaching other team members in architectural skills, and for collaborating with the enterprise architecture team (if one exists) in your organization.
- Enterprise architect (EA). Someone who is responsible for identifying, communicating, and evolving the enterprise architecture.
- Enterprise architecture (EA). An organization’s enterprise architecture consists of the various structures and processes of an organization, including both technical structures and processes as well as business/domain structures and processes. There is always an enterprise architecture, even when it isn’t documented.
- Enterprise architecture model (EAM). An EAM is a representation of those structures and processes. A good enterprise architecture model will depict the organization both as it is today and as it is envisioned in the future and will map the various views representing the architecture to one another. These views include both business-oriented perspectives as well as technical perspectives. In many ways enterprise architecture models are a communication bridge between senior business stakeholders and senior IT professionals.
- Reference architecture - agile. A working, high-quality example of an architectural component. For instance, you may have a web services reference architecture which shows how a web service is built and invoked within your organization’s IT ecosystem. This example will often be used as a template by developers as a basis for their own work. This example will include supporting documentation that describes how to properly use it.
- Reference architecture - traditional. A document, or set of documents, describing an architectural component and strategies for using it.