Domain relationships
- damian.hickey
Introduction
The Orthogramic Metamodel provides a unified structure for understanding how business architecture elements interact across and within organisational boundaries. Two key constructs underpin this interconnected view: cross-domain relationships and inter-unit domain relationships. Together, they enable a more complete and actionable understanding of how strategies, capabilities, initiatives, and organisational structures work together to deliver value.
Cross-domain relationships
Cross-domain relationships describe how elements from different business architecture domains—such as Strategy, Capability, Value Stream, Product, Policy, or Stakeholder—connect to form a coherent enterprise model. These relationships reveal the dependencies, influences, and alignments that exist across domains, supporting traceability, impact analysis, strategic alignment, and decision-making. Cross-domain relationships are essential for integrating diverse areas of business architecture into a single, navigable structure. See: Cross-domain relationships
Inter-unit domain relationships
Inter-unit domain relationships describe how elements belonging to different organisational units interact within the same domain. For example, a Capability managed by one unit may depend on, contribute to, or collaborate with a Capability owned by another unit. These relationships are critical for surfacing operational interdependencies, improving cross-functional coordination, clarifying accountability, and managing the risks and opportunities that arise from distributed responsibility across the organisation. See: Inter-unit domain relationships
Key differences
Aspect | Cross-domain relationships | Inter-unit domain relationships |
|---|---|---|
Focus | Connections between different domains (e.g., Strategy to Capability) | Connections between organisational units within the same domain (e.g., Capability to Capability across units) |
Purpose | To integrate business architecture elements across domains into a unified model | To reveal collaboration, dependency, and accountability between organisational units |
Scope | Enterprise-wide across all domains | Within a single domain, but across multiple units |
Use cases | Strategic alignment, enterprise traceability, holistic impact analysis | Operational alignment, cross-functional collaboration, responsibility mapping |
Both types of relationships are essential for building a dynamic, transparent, and strategically aligned business architecture. They work together to ensure that the organisation can understand not just what it does and how it operates, but how the pieces fit together both structurally and functionally.
Directionality in domain relationships
Domain relationships in the Orthogramic Metamodel are directional—typically flowing from an initiating (active) domain to a receiving (passive) domain. For example, a Capability may use Information or enable a Value Stream, but not the reverse. This directionality reflects intent and influence and should be maintained in models to ensure clarity, consistency, and alignment with the metamodel's semantic structure. For more, see Domain relationship directionality
The Orthogramic Metamodel license: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0), ensuring it remains open, collaborative, and widely accessible.