Multiple shades of Architecture and how to make sense of them
There has been much confusion in the terminology used in IT organizations and Architecture takes the cake. There are so many roles ending with Architect that it always confuses everyone. Thankfully various standards bodies came together and decided to establish a Taxonomy to ensure a common language and understanding around the various architecture roles.
You can find the full text of the below information on https://www.naf.nl/feapo-announces-new-enterprise-architecture-genre-definitions/
Standard Definitions of various Architectures
Enterprise Architecture: Enterprise Architecture represents the holistic planning, analysis, design, and implementation for the development and execution of strategy by applying principles and practices to guide organizations through the integration and inter-operation of all other
architecture domains.
Business Architecture: Business Architecture represents holistic, multidimensional business views of: capabilities, end‐to‐end value delivery, information, and organizational structure; and the relationships among these business views and strategies, products, policies, initiatives, and stakeholders.
Solution Architecture: Solution Architecture represents the end to end management of application, data and technology concerns of large systems which usually consists of multiple applications and these applications are usually owned and managed by different business areas.
Application Architecture: Application Architecture represents the specification and structural partitioning of technology‐based automation into business logic, user experience, and data perspectives as an enabler of business architecture and strategy. This roles is on similar lines as solution architecture but usually concerns with simple and siloed applications.
Data Architecture: Data Architecture represents integration of value specifications for qualitative and quantitative variables and their alignment with business architecture and strategy.
Technical Architecture: Technical Architecture represents the logical and physical interconnection of infrastructure elements to enable the deployment and management of data architecture, application architecture, business architecture, and strategy.
What about Security Architecture
Security has traditionally not been considered as a separate architecture domain while it is no doubt a separate domain. The reason for this is that security affects all other domains and is considered as a cross-cutting concern.
Where is Information Architecture and how it differs from Data Architecture
This is another area that is sometimes used interchangeably but is there a difference?
Data — → Information — → Insights
Data is like crude oil which needs to be refined to produce gasoline, diesel, LPG etc which can be related to Information. Simply put, data refers to raw, unorganized facts. Think of data as bundles of bulk entries gathered and stored without context. Once context has been attributed to the data by stringing two or more pieces together in a meaningful way, it becomes information.
Data architecture deals with technology aspects like Databases, schemas and work at application level. It concerns with ingestion, transformation, storage and consumption level while Information architecture is more related to Data management, governance and other higher level concerns. To give a sense of the difference we can look at the assets information architecture deals with which would seem alien to people who mostly deals with data architectures.
Information assets can exist in one of several categories:
- Catalogues
- Dashboards
- Documents
- Ontologies
- Schedules
- Taxonomies
- Templates
- Terminologies
Can the difference between architecture be explained by a model
