Orthogramic Metamodel

Introduction

The Orthogramic Metamodel provides a structured, open, and extensible foundation for business architecture. It is designed to help organisations of all sizes and sectors achieve strategic clarity, operational alignment, and governance at scale.

Whether you're new to business architecture or seeking a more structured and digital-first alternative to narrative frameworks like BIZBOK, this space introduces you to the Orthogramic approach and guides you in getting started.

What is the Orthogramic Metamodel?

The Orthogramic Metamodel defines a comprehensive and extensible structure for representing the business architecture of any organisation. It is grounded in practical needs from government, enterprise, and regulated industries, and is designed to support dynamic alignment between strategic objectives, operational structures, and measurable outcomes.

The metamodel includes domains such as Organisation, Stakeholder, Strategy, Capabilities, Products, Services, Information, Performance, Initiatives, Policy, and Value Streams. Each domain is defined with a consistent schema that supports attributes, elements, sub-elements, and traceable relationships, allowing for integration, validation, and governance across digital platforms.

In addition to these domains, the Orthogramic Metamodel includes:

• Inter-unit domain relationships, which describe how organisational units interact with and depend on each other across capabilities, services, policies, and other domain elements, using clearly defined role types such as owning, providing, consuming, and dependent units.

• The Strategic Response Model, a formalised structure for tracing external pressures and internal performance insights to responsive changes across strategies, capabilities, policies, and initiatives.

• External organizations, which represent third-party entities such as partners, vendors, or regulators that interact with the organisation through shared services, capabilities, policies, or information flows, supporting ecosystem-level modelling and alignment.

• A schema-first approach, with each domain published as a publicly available JSON Schema, enabling automation, validation, and programmatic analysis of business architecture data.

Collectively, these components form a living framework that enables real-time understanding and continuous improvement of strategic alignment, operational effectiveness, and enterprise design.

Get started

Choose a starting point that suits your role or experience level:

• The model at a glance – A high-level visual summary of the model's structure.

• New to Business Architecture – A guide for newcomers with simple steps to begin modelling.

• Familiar with BIZBOK? – A transition guide for experienced practitioners.

• Getting started by problem examples – Practical use cases based on common organisational challenges.

• Getting started Worksheet - Learn by doing

• Intro to business architecture terms – Clear definitions and examples to build shared understanding.

Explore the model

Each domain is supported by its own overview and schema:

• Capabilities

• Organisation

• Stakeholders

• Strategy

• Products

• Services

• Information

• Performance

• Initiatives

• Policy

• Value streams

Open source manifesto

The Orthogramic Open Source Manifesto outlines our commitment to transparency, interoperability, and community stewardship. The model is freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence, with contributions welcomed via documented guidelines.