Cross Domain Relationships

Overview

Cross domain relationships in Orthogramic provide the connective tissue between business architecture domains. They define how different types of architectural elements influence, depend on, or support each other, allowing for meaningful insights, traceability, and alignment across the organisation.

These relationships are surfaced throughout the platform and are used for:

Enabling strategic alignment checks
Supporting recommendation logic
Facilitating visualisation of dependency chains in mindmaps
Highlighting misalignment or duplication across domains

The relationships are derived directly from the Orthogramic Metamodel and support automatic inference of organisational structure, responsibility, and impact.

Relationship types

Each cross domain relationship is defined by:

Source domain (e.g. Strategy)
Target domain (e.g. Capabilities)
Relationship type (e.g. influences, enables, supports)
Directionality (uni- or bi-directional)

Examples:

Strategy → Capabilities (influences)
Capabilities → Value Stream (enables)
Value Stream → Initiative (delivers)
Stakeholders → Services (owns)
Policy → Information (governs)

These are maintained within the metamodel and visualised within Orthogramic Insights to support exploration and navigation.

Relationship type list

Node	Role type
	`consuming`
	`supported`
	`governing`
	`constrains`
	`enables`
	`mitigates`
	`monitors`
	`drives_demand`
	`responds_to`
	`aligns_with`
	`oversight_of`
	`accountable_to`
	`forecasts_for`
	`funds`
	`quantifies`
	`reports_on`

Use in document analysis

When documents are parsed, relationships between domains are inferred based on sentence structure, contextual clues, and declared associations (e.g. “This initiative improves customer engagement by enhancing CRM capabilities”).

These inferred relationships are validated and used to:

Detect missing or weakly defined connections
Assess quality and completeness of a document
Propose recommendations to improve alignment

Use in mindmaps

Cross domain relationships are rendered in mindmaps to:

Show how elements from different domains relate visually
Allow users to follow logical chains from Strategy through to Initiatives and Performance
Enable dynamic exploration of organisational alignment

Use in recommendations

Orthogramic uses cross domain relationships to:

Identify capability gaps blocking strategic goals
Recommend services or stakeholders needed for an initiative
Highlight policies or information dependencies that require attention

Difference from inter-domain relationships

Cross domain relationships describe the conceptual and operational connections between different types of elements across domains (e.g. a Strategy influencing a Capability). They are structural to the metamodel and are not confined to any particular organisational unit.

By contrast, inter-domain relationships focus on how these cross-domain connections manifest across different organisational units—for instance, how a Capability in one unit depends on a Service or Initiative governed by another. Inter-unit domain relationships are thus a subset of cross domain relationships, contextualised to show organisational span, dependency, and potential silos.

Extensibility

New relationship types can be added over time as the metamodel evolves. User feedback and document analysis are both sources for suggesting and validating additional relationship types.

Related pages

Inter-unit domain relationship