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The Orthogramic metamodel’s open model
The Orthogramic metamodel is being made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) license, ensuring that it remains open, collaborative, and widely accessible. In contrast, the BIZBOK (Business Architecture Body of Knowledge) framework remains a closed and proprietary model managed by the Business Architecture Guild.
Orthogramic Metamodel licensing advantages
Here’s why the Orthogramic metamodel offers significant advantages:
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Orthogramic’s Open Model (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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BIZBOK’s Closed Model
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Openness and collaboration
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By adopting a Creative Commons license, the Orthogramic metamodel fosters an open, collaborative environment. Organizations, researchers, and practitioners can contribute to its evolution, enhancing its relevance and applicability across industries. This dynamic model ensures continuous innovation and refinement.
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BIZBOK is centrally controlled and proprietary, limiting external contributions. This makes it slower to adapt to emerging trends and restricts innovation to a small group of approved contributors.
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Accessibility and flexibility
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The Orthogramic metamodel is freely accessible to individuals, businesses, and educational institutions. It can be used, modified, and redistributed as long as proper attribution is provided and adaptations are shared under the same license. This ensures broader adoption across industries and sectors.
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BIZBOK requires paid memberships or purchases to access its materials, making it inaccessible to many organizations—particularly startups, non-profits, and universities. This barrier limits its adoption outside large enterprises willing to invest in proprietary frameworks.
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Innovation and customization
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The Creative Commons license encourages innovation by allowing businesses to customize and extend the metamodel to fit their unique needs. Whether integrating with proprietary systems or adapting it to industry-specific challenges, users have the flexibility to shape the model to their advantage.
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BIZBOK provides a structured but rigid framework. Users must adhere to its standardized structure, making customization difficult without explicit approval or workaround solutions. The proprietary nature restricts derivative works and adaptations.
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Community-driven support and growth
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A community of practitioners and researchers can openly share enhancements, best practices, and refinements to the Orthogramic metamodel. This results in a self-sustaining ecosystem where collective intelligence drives continuous improvement.
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BIZBOK restricts collaborative engagement to paying members within its formal structure. This limits organic community-driven improvements and slows down adaptation to real-world business challenges.
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Cost-effectiveness
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The Orthogramic metamodel is free to use, making it an attractive option for startups, small businesses, and educational institutions that need an enterprise-grade framework without licensing fees.
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Access to BIZBOK requires a paid subscription or training costs, creating financial barriers for organizations with limited budgets. This restricts the widespread use of the framework, particularly in emerging markets.
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Global adoption and standardisation
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Creative Commons licensing facilitates global adoption, making the Orthogramic metamodel accessible across industries, geographies, and business functions. As organizations worldwide adopt it, it can become a widely accepted standard in business architecture.
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BIZBOK’s restricted access and regional licensing limitations make it less adaptable to international collaboration. Its closed nature slows down cross-border standardisation efforts.
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Transparency and trust
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Transparency is at the core of the Orthogramic metamodel. The framework’s assumptions, methodologies, and rationale are open to scrutiny, fostering trust and independent validation by experts and practitioners.
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BIZBOK’s proprietary nature means that its intellectual property is not fully visible to non-members. Users must rely on the Business Architecture Guild’s interpretation without full insight into its reasoning or underlying research.
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Speed of updates and revisions
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The Creative Commons approach ensures that updates and improvements can be made in real-time by the broader business architecture community. Users can adopt and benefit from immediate refinements without waiting for scheduled releases.
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Introduction
The Orthogramic Metamodel and BIZBOK represent two distinct approaches to structuring and applying business architecture. While both aim to provide clarity and alignment across enterprise functions, they differ significantly in their foundational philosophies, modelling approaches, and accessibility.
This comparison highlights how the Orthogramic Metamodel builds upon industry practice, extending key concepts through a schema-first, open-source model designed for traceability, interoperability, and strategic responsiveness. It introduces additional formal domains—such as Policy and Performance—and provides structured support for inter-unit relationships and strategic response modelling. These features enable a more dynamic, machine-readable, and integrable approach that supports real-time alignment across complex organisational environments.
The comparison is presented in three parts: a detailed comparison examining structure and domain coverage, a summary comparison highlighting key points of differentiation, and a licensing comparison outlining the practical and strategic implications of each model’s openness, accessibility, and adaptability.
By contrasting the design choices, domain breadth, and governance models of each, this analysis provides strategic decision-makers, business architects, and analysts with a grounded understanding of how each metamodel can support modern enterprise transformation initiatives.
Relationship with BIZBOK
While influenced by established business architecture practices, the Orthogramic Metamodel is an original work and does not incorporate or reproduce any copyrighted content from the BIZBOK Guide.