| Abstraction | In technology architecture, the separation of what a component does and how it does it. A component’s interface specifies how another component can call and make use of the services it provides but hides what is going on under the covers. The value of abstraction is plasticity, in which a component can be modified in such a way that it continues to respond to its interface while how it works can be restructured or rebuilt. | Technology | Architecture |
| Agile Industrial Complex (AIC) | A somewhat snide reference to the explosion of different variants of Agile development approaches, which are protected by trademarks and copyrights, and which are little different from one-another. Nonetheless, intellectual property rights are zealously protected by their owners, even though the value of a lot of the approaches and services they provide are not substantially different and of questionable value. | Technology | Development |
| Agile Software Development | A group of incremental approaches to application design and development intended to accelerate delivery of working software and evolve it as it is taking shape. | Technology | Development |
| API Management | Application Program Interface Management. A standards-based systems integration scheme that makes it easy to share and interoperate application systems. It is useful for both internal- and external-facing systems. One of its main advantages is that it allows service providers to be refactored, restructured or rebuilt with minimal visibility or impact to service consumers. | Digital Pillar | |
| Artificial Intelligence (AI) | A wide range of approaches, most employing advanced statistical techniques to accelerate and sharpen pattern recognition and to optimize solutions to a variety of problems, among many other things. | Discipline | |
| As-Is | The current state. This may apply to anything relating to your company and is the starting point for all planning activities relation to transformation. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Bayesian Inference, Bayes Network | A method of statistical inference in which the probability for a hypothesis is updated as more information is collected. A useful approach when little data is available to support estimating the probability of an event. | Statistical Analysis | |
| BizDevOps | An integration of DevOps systems development into a process of rapidly evolving business operations at a similar speed as software is evolved. | Discipline | |
| Blockchain | A linked set of records that are cryptographically protected from modification and, therefore, create an immutable record of whatever is stored on it. Blockchains can enable Business Models that rely on zero trust between parties and have many other applications. | Technology | Architecture |
| Broadband | High-capacity telecommunications protocols that support high speed data communication. | Technology | Architecture |
| Business Agility | The ability to recognize and respond to opportunities, threats or events quickly. Business Agility is a major goal of Digital Transformation and is facilitated by Agile ERM. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Business Architecture | A modeling discipline in which the entities that are combined to create value for customers are identified and their relationships and interdependencies on one another evaluated to identify opportunities to improve performance and results. BA models are built on top of EA models and the entities that they contain. | Discipline | |
| Business as Usual (BAU) | Day-to-day operations. | Business | |
| Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI/A) | A set of Capabilities involving Analytics, including Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, intended to produce actionable insight into a company’s markets and enable it to make better decisions about its products, marketing and operations than it could without it. | Digital Pillar | |
| Business Model | Describes the value proposition that the company will offer–the products and services that the company will sell and to whom they will be targeted. Each individual product or product group may have its own Business Model. | Enterprise Architecture | |
| Business Process | A pattern of activity that results in a targeted end state or product or other desired outcome. Processes range from random and unstructured or highly-structured and automated. | Business | |
| Business Process Automation (BPA) | The application of automation to increase efficiency and consistency in the execution of business processes. It may also be known as workflow management software. | Technology | Process Automation |
| Business Process Management (BPM) | A discipline in which business processes are discovered, modeled, analyzed, measured and, potentially, modified to improve various characteristics and aspects of their performance. Frequently, automation is applied to realize desired improvements. | Discipline | |
| Business Process Mining | A discipline in which various techniques and automated tools are employed to identify implicit business processes that may be executed in a company’s operations but not be recognized for what they are. Identifying a process is the first step to analyzing and improving it. | Discipline | |
| Capability | Things that a company is able to do to deliver value. For instance, auto companies design and build cars, bakers bake cakes and developers build software. | Enterprise Architecture | |
| Cash Cow | From the BCG market-share growth model: A product or line of business that has attained a substantial market share in a mature, low-growth or declining market. This positioning provides above-average profits combined with reduced incentives for competitors to enter the market ahead of what should be a diminishing life expectancy for it. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Change Management | A governance and operational discipline in which transformation, transition and change are monitored and managed. With respect to AERM and company operations, there is a Change Management Team which is intended to act as a Project Management Office (PMO) and to ensure that critical metadata (such as changes to the baseline EA model) is captured and acted on in sync with changes that are occurring in the organization as it evolves. | Discipline | |
| Cloud architectures | The Architecture of hardware and software systems that are employed to provide cloud services. Abstraction is a feature of such architectures and allows them to present an interface that appears to be private to the consumer, but which is hosted on shared infrastructure. Elasticity and redundancy are also important features of cloud architecture. | Technology | Architecture |
| Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) | COSO was established by five organizations: COSO has the support of five support organizations: American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), American Accounting Association (AAA), Financial Executives International (FEI), Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) and Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) as a joint initiative to combat fraud. Subsequently, it turned its attention to Risk Management and publishes frequently on the subject. | Governance | Organizations |
| Compliance | A governance discipline in which an organization monitors operational processes to ensure that they are being executed to specifications. | Discipline | |
| Componentization | Partitioning Enablers employed to provide a service so as to make them more versatile and plastic. This may refer to an organization just the same as to software components. High cohesion/loose coupling is a concept that applies to componentized designs. | Technology | Architecture |
| Computer-Assisted Design (CAD) | The use of specialized system solutions to facilitate design. Often, such solutions are integrated with fabrication or assembly tooling to create efficiency in the process of designing and making things. | Technology | Architecture |
| Confidence Level | Based on a variable’s expected value, distribution and variance or standard deviation, the Confidence Interval gives a range of potential values that represents a selected percent chance an observation will fall within. For example, if a variable is normally distributed with mean M and standard deviation Z then an observation will be projected to fall within M+/- 2Z 95% of the time. This represents a 95% Confidence Interval. In the HPTCo case 95% and 99% intervals are presented for the aggregated capacity utilization of the Standard plant. | Statistical Analysis | |
| Configuration Management Database (CMDB) | A repository containing an inventory of system assets, which usually includes information about the assets, who is using them, where they are physically located and who should be paying for them. It may be a valuable source of information for discovery activities. | Technology | Architecture |
| Content Delivery Network (CDN) | A geographically distributed network of data centers, servers and storage which is used to bring content closer to consumers. This reduces latency and improves their user experience by reducing response time. | Technology | Architecture |
| Contingency Budget | A reserve added to a project’s budget to account for the possibility of unforeseen overruns. Overall, there may be different contingency categories, depending on the nature of a project and the environment in which it is being implemented. | Technology | Development |
| Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) | A combination of processes, tooling and techniques intended to automate much of the work of building and deploying software, thereby allowing frequent deployments. Companies that have mature CI/CD capabilities can deploy new software many times per day. | Technology | Development |
| Controlled Transformation | The process of transitioning from a starting state to a targeted state in a disciplined and planned manner, as opposed to making some changes to address urgent issues. | Transformation | |
| Core Business Process-Concept to Product | The process by which a company takes an idea and develops a marketable product or service from it. | Business | |
| Core Business Process-Demand to Supply | The process by which a company plans for, produces and delivers its products or services to the marketplace. | Business | |
| Core Business Process-Market to Customer | The process by which a company communicates and interacts with prospects and customers throughout their process of purchasing. | Business | |
| Core Business Process-Order to Cash | The process by which a company accepts orders for, delivers and receives payments for its products and services. | Business | |
| Correlation | A statistical relationship between two random variables. It is most usually employed to test for predictive relationships. Calculating a correlation coefficient requires the covariance, so the two are closely related. | Statistical Analysis | |
| Covariance | Measures the degree to which two variables tend to be above or below their means together. This requires paired observations, e.g., percent of a day that the sun is out and the number of ice cream cones sold. If covariance is positive, both will tend to move together, e.g., more sun, more cone sales. If covariance is negative, then when one variable is above its mean, the other will be below, e.g., more clouds or rain, less cone sales. covariance figures heavily into statistical processes employed for prediction, such as regression analysis. | Statistical Analysis | |
| Critical Success Factors (CSFs) | Precursors to success, which a company will monitor when executing a program or implementing an initiative. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Data Architecture | A discipline for managing the logical structure and physical storage of a company’s data. Good data architecture promotes sharing and minimizes redundancy, thus promoting efficient use and reuse and minimizing costs. | Technology | Data Management |
| Data Governance | A data management discipline focused on its use, protection and preservation as an asset with great value. This may involve everything from architecture management to access and use policies. | Technology | Data Management |
| Data Lake | A repository of data that is stored in its raw or original format. Most often, it is composed of data that was stored without specific plans to reuse it, in the expectation that eventually, it would be. Data in Data Lakes are searched, filtered, extracted and integrated when it is used. Taxonomic metadata, therefore, is extremely important to preserving the value of the contents of a Data Lake. Data Lakes that are not managed properly become Data Swamps, which are intrinsically valueless. | Technology | Data Management |
| Data Replication | Automated processes in which data transacted or stored in one repository is echoed or replicated into another. Complications that must be accommodated include isolation and prevention of transactional conflicts. Usually, in database replication, one instance of the database is primary or master and the rest of the instances into which data is replicated, are slaves. One use of replication is to maintain consistency of read-only instances located on a content delivery network. | Technology | Data Management |
| Decentralization | Distributing management and decision-making throughout an organization so that they can be closer to the operational areas where they apply. | Enterprise Architecture | |
| Delphi Method | An approach to querying a panel of experts for information relevant to a subject under study. It involves having a group of SMEs or experts create independent responses to a question or issue and then collating and redistributing them without attribution for reconsideration and response. It is intended to promote consideration of alternative views without bias relating to whose views they may be. | Business | |
| DevOps | Part of the enablement for CI/CD. | Technology | Development |
| Digital Process Automation (DPA) | Similar to RPA but wider in scope. From TechTarget: “A big focus of DPA is to improve employee and customer experiences by taking friction out of the workflow. The software is used to create efficiencies and enhance UX in various areas of the enterprise, from IT service requests to onboarding new employees and client intake.” | Technology | Process Automation |
| Digital Products & Services Factory | A set of Capabilities and Enablers through which a company creates, delivers and evolves digital products and services. It requires a value-stream product management approach, enabled by an integrated PM/technology team and high-speed software development and deployment capabilities. | Digital Pillar | |
| Digital Transformation | the process of integrating digital technologies into all areas of your business in order to achieve maximum agility and efficiency and, to allow better interaction with and among you, your customers, workers and external stakeholders. | Business | |
| Discovery | The process of eliciting information from an organization, usually for a specified purpose. Discovery is conducted, for example, to identify the as-is elements of a company’s EA. | Business | |
| Distributed Governance | A governance scheme in which authority to make investment and other decisions is pushed down to where it is most relevant, eliminating the need for submission and review processes that slow down decision processes. This promotes Business Agility. | Digital Pillar | |
| Diversification | Financial Diversification is the result of making multiple investments to increase return while reducing risk. This usually results from acquiring instruments that are imperfectly, if not negatively, correlated. It may also refer to purchasing inputs from multiple suppliers to reduce exposure to any one of them failing to deliver as or when expected. Or, it might refer to efforts to increase a company’s customer base, to minimize overexposure to damage resulting from having one of them cease buying from it. Finally, it might also refer to a company’s creating multiple products so as to minimize dependence on any one of them. | Business | |
| Edge Computing | A distributed computing scheme in which computing power and storage are distributed geographically to bring it closer to consumers. This reduces latency and increases the responsiveness they experience. | Technology | Architecture |
| Emergent Architecture | Results from building solutions without a central plan. Often results in redundancy and sub-optimal architecture, which is more difficult and expensive to maintain and evolve than it could be. | Technology | Architecture |
| Enabler | EA entities that make it possible to exercise Capabilities. In the EA palette employed for AERM, these consist of Physical Assets, People, Processes, Application (Technology Components and Data Artifacts) | Enterprise Architecture | |
| Endpoint | A service-providing component of a componentized architecture, e.g., a database or a transaction processing service. | Technology | Architecture |
| Enterprise Architecture | A modeling discipline in which the elements of a company’s anatomy are employed to represent a state of the company. These include Markets and Segments, Products and Services, Value Streams, Capabilities and Enablers. The EA model employed in conjunction with AERM encompasses four levels–Strategy, Business Model, Operating Model and Operational Architecture. | Discipline | |
| Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) | Integrate management of enterprise processes, such as procurement, payments, invoicing and accounts receivable. Often supported by monolithic software systems. | Technology | Architecture |
| Enterprise Risk Management | A governance discipline in which the company monitors for risks associated with its operations, analyzes them and develops and implements treatments for them. Optimally, RM works from a proactive stance, helping the company to design its operating processes to maximize the risk/reward ratios and minimize risk, overall. | Discipline | |
| European General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) | The European data privacy and security regulations. It specifies what companies that come into possession of individuals’ personal information are required to do to protect it and prevent misuse or disclosure, among other things. | Business | Regulation |
| Frequentist Statistics | A method of statistical inference based on analyzing data based on proportion or frequency of values, for instance determining the data’s mean or standard deviation. An alternative to Bayesian inference. | Statistical Analysis | |
| Future of Work | An ambiguously defined term, generally referring to the impacts our evolving environment are creating on how companies and individuals’ careers must be managed to be successful. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Gantt Chart | A bar chart usually used to document a project schedule, showing time horizontally and specific tasks in rows. The Gantt Chart is one of the most commonly used artifacts used to visually display project plans in MS Project. | Technology | Development |
| Geolocation | Technology that integrates GPS and applications that use the information to enhance or enable location-dependent services. Waze is an example, serving relevant ads to drivers that are passing through an area whose boundaries are selected by the advertiser. | Technology | |
| Governance | Generally, oversight exercised by a company’s Board and Management to ensure that operations are conducted in accordance with policies and specifications. | Discipline | |
| Heat Map | A two-dimensional representation often applied to represent risks. The dimensions usually are probability of occurrence and level of impact. Higher probability, higher impacts are coded in red while low/lows are coded in yellow or green. Heat maps are of some value with respect to prioritizing individual risks for scrutiny but are often mis-used to represent overall risk management effectiveness. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| High cohesion/Loose coupling | Desirable characteristics of software architecture in which individual components are highly focused on doing only what they are meant to do (cohesive) and do not rely on other components unnecessarily (not coupled.) The same characteristics can also be applied to organization and process design. | Technology | Architecture |
| Horizontal integration | A business combination in which a parent company owns multiple businesses that are operated independently of one-another. Horizontal integration can be part of a diversification strategy. If profitability of sibling companies are negatively correlated, it can serve to smooth corporate earnings. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Horizontal Scaling | An approach to expanding computing power that involves adding servers or processors in parallel to share a workload. Systems designed to support horizontal scaling are inherently more elastic, i.e., can be expanded or contracted easily by provisioning or deprovisioning servers. | Technology | Architecture |
| Hybrid Cloud Architecture | An infrastructure composed of public and private clouds and/or multiple public clouds. Since each cloud environment and each provider may have different features and services and will certainly name them differently than one-another, managing hybrid cloud environments is more complex than managing a single one. However, there are benefits, such as redundancy and avoiding vendor lock in. | Technology | Architecture |
| Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) | A completely self-service approach that allows customers access to manage their own cloud-based environments. They contract for compute power, storage and network capacity and manage just as if they were deployed on their own on-premise environment. Underlying cloud architectures and services provide elasticity and other useful options that are not generally available to companies that operate and manage their own infrastructures. | Technology | Architecture |
| Infrastructure as Code (IaC) | The process of describing infrastructure assets in configuration files that can be processed to provision them, update them or deprovision them automatically. This is extremely useful for instantiating a set of components to execute a periodic task and then decommissioning them, eliminating the charge for operating them. | Technology | Development |
| Initiative | Essentially, a project but differentiated by the breadth of considerations with which it’s managed. A project is intended to produce a deliverable, an initiative is intended to produce a business outcome. | Transformation | |
| Innovation | A new or enhanced approach to creating value, give an as-is state; that is, taking what exists and doing something new with it, such as creating a new business model. May be applied on top of a new invention. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Inputs, Processing, Outputs framework | With respect to governance, is a framework for understanding how governance processes operate: what information is ingested by them, what processing occurs within them and what output is produced by them. This framework is applied to understanding potential implications of making changes to the company or its operational processes, with the intent to preserve the validity of governance when executing them. | Governance | |
| Inside-Out | A view of prospective change that emanates from within a company. Often, a precursor driven by internal invention or innovation, for instance, developing a new product or service and then taking it to market. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Internal Rate of Return (IRR) | The discount rate that causes a zero NPV from a series of cash flows. For instance, the IRR of an investment of $100 that pays $110 at the end of a year is 10%. | Business | Financial Calculation |
| International Organization for Standardization (ISO) | An international confederation of numerous standards-setting bodies. ISO has published a number of standards and certification processes for practices that are subscribed to by many of the world’s largest companies. | Governance | Organizations |
| Internet of Things (IoT) | A network of physical objects that have sensors and software embedded in them so that they can be in communication with software applications and sometimes each other. IoT supports myriad uses, for both consumers and businesses. For instance, smart homes and buildings can provide a constant stream of data about the status of a building so that the internal temperature can be monitored and maintained most efficiently. | Technology | Architecture |
| Invention | Creating or discovering something that didn’t previously or wasn’t known previously to exist, Teflon®, for instance. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Kaizen | A discipline of incremental improvement, originally focused on factory operations. It was developed in the US during WWII and brought to Japan by representatives serving under the Marshall plan. It is in common use today. | Discipline | |
| Kanban | A Lean work management approach that is employed to balance demand and capacity, largely in a software development context. In Kanban, outstanding backlog, work in progress and completed work items are posted on a board that everyone can see, increasing transparency and helping to avoid flooding available resources, which creates bottlenecks and reduces throughput. | Discipline | |
| Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) | Performance measures that are selected as barometers for the success of an initiative. Ideally, KPIs provide a rapid and reliable measure of the company’s effectiveness at reaching a desired outcome. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Knowledge Management | A discipline in which metainformation (information about information) is created and maintained to enable parties to identify and locate information and resources that can help them to perform the functions for which they are responsible. KM is a key to reuse, avoiding unnecessary redundancy and agility | Discipline | |
| Labeling | Attachment of metadata to facilitate retrieval of the data to which it is attached. Also, an element of a graph database of the sort that was employed to illustrate some of the examples in this book. A Neo4j labeled property graph was used for this purpose. | Technology | Data Management |
| Legacy Management Processes | Traditional management processes that may be antithetical to agile management practices. These are often command-and-control oriented, which centralize decision-making authority at higher management levels, creating impediments to rapid action. They may also rely on standard calendars (such as quarterly or annual budgeting,) which create natural lags in decision-making, and one-shot funding, in which initiatives are either funded or declined, which creates zero-sum games between the parties involved. | Discipline | |
| LeSS | Large Scale Scrum—an approach to managing multiple related Scrum project teams. | Technology | Development |
| Machine Learning (ML) | From Wikipedia: “. . . the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience and by the use of data. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine learning algorithms build a model based on sample data, known as ‘training data’, to make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to do so.” | Technology | AI |
| Market, Segment | The universe of prospective purchasers of a company’s products or services or a subset of it. | Enterprise Architecture | |
| Master Data Management (MDM) | A governance and management discipline focused on ensuring the uniformity, accuracy and consistency of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets, which include things such as customer IDs. | Technology | Data Management |
| Mean, Expected Value | The mean is the weighted average of observations in a set. The Expected Value is the ex ante guess one would make of what a random observation would be, given no other information. For instance, if asked to guess what the height of a student in a grade school class might be, the best guess would be the mean for the student’s gender and age group. | Statistical Analysis | |
| Minimum Viable Product (MVP) | A version of a prospective product that contains the minimum scope of features and characteristics necessary to make it marketable. The MVP is released to minimize the time and cost required to get the product in front of customers to allow it to produce some revenue and provide time to continue its development and evolution. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| MLOps | An approach to managing Machine Learning models and their components. ML processes are often run and rerun on a regular basis to incorporate new data and MLOps is employed to ensure the consistency and reliability of the process. | Technology | Development |
| National Institute of Standards (NIST) | A physical sciences lab operated by the US Department of Commerce. Among the Standard Reference Materials it publishes are a number relating to processes, such as the NIST Risk Management Framework, which address secure software sourcing and development. | Governance | Organizations |
| Natural Language Processing (NLP) | An area of linguistics and artificial intelligence applied to creating human-computer interfaces that allow computers to recognize human communication, as either speech or text. | Technology | AI |
| Net Present Value (NPV) | The sum of a series of cash flows (in or out,) each discounted over time at a given rate. ‘Normal’ or ‘conventional’ cash flows consist of an initial outflow followed by some number of inflows, such as the cash flows from purchasing a bond; however, techniques for calculating NPV do not require conventional cash flows. | Business | Financial Calculation |
| Net Promoter Score (NPS) | A measure of customer acceptance of a company, product or service. It is the difference between the percent of survey respondents that are promoters, who would recommend the company, product or service to others and detractors, those that say that they would not. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) | Similar to KPIs, OKRs are the measures in a goal-setting framework, used to assess a company’s performance with respect to its targeted outcomes. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Ontology Management | Ontology is a discipline associated with classification and is an extension of taxonomy. In the context of AERM, it is a part of KM. | Discipline | |
| OODA Loop | Observe, Orient, Decide, Act: A cycle in which decisions are made and actions taken. Reducing overall decision latency (the time between when an event requiring a response occurs and action is taken) requires improvement in each of the steps. Observation is improved by focusing on pre-determined indicators. Orientation is improved by having thought through the inputs required for decision-making. Decision-making is improved by algorithmic analysis. Acting is improved by having defined a thought-out response for most likely scenarios. AERM employs these concepts to reduce latency in determining risk management strategies when confronted with changes in the company. | Business | |
| Operating Model | The subset anatomy of your company dedicated to producing the value that you sell. It consists of the Value Streams, Capabilities and is dependent on the Enablers contained in the Operational Architecture. | Enterprise Architecture | |
| Operational Architecture | The resource entities that support the Operating Model. | Enterprise Architecture | |
| Operational Infrastructure | A rationalized infrastructure and operating platform based on, to the degree possible, common shared technologies, networks and so on. The design goals for it are agility, elasticity, versatility and plasticity, among other things. It is likely to employ APIs as a primary integration mechanism and Cloud-native architecture. | Digital Pillar | |
| Orchestration | Automated coordination of the components in loosely-coupled configurations to achieve specific goals. This may include guiding the process of provisioning and deploying infrastructure components or guiding the execution of an application process to deliver a service. | Technology | Architecture |
| Order Management System | An application system that front-ends the process of accepting orders and passing them along for further action as a part of an order-to-cash business process. | Technology | Architecture |
| Outside-In | A view of prospective change that emanates from outside a company–from the markets in which it competes. Outside-in events, such as a competitor enhancing a product to make it more competitive, represent challenges to which the company has to respond. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Partner Development Platform | A set of services based on the DPSF model and the Capabilities and Enablers that support it, that enable the company to create digital services that will be attractive to and facilitate partners that can augment the company’s offerings. | Digital Pillar | |
| Pattern Library | A repository of artifacts produced in the course of evolving the company. By nature, many types of objects–text documents, design artifacts that may come from specialized design tools, databases and so on, may be included. A data lake may be a useful solution to the requirement to maintain this information, but its value must be ensured by consistently naming objects and applying tags to them with values from the taxonomy. | Enterprise Architecture | |
| PESTLE | Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental—a mnemonic of major external forces that act on companies and which should be monitored for external risks. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Platform as a Service (PaaS) | Layers additional services on the IaaS model to make it easier to develop and deliver applications and unburden customers of the need to monitor and maintain individual servers and network components. Virtualization (an abstraction) obviates the need for the customer to know or care exactly what hardware is employed to support his apps or to be responsible for maintaining it. | Technology | Architecture |
| Product, Service | What your company sells. | Enterprise Architecture | |
| Program Management | A discipline for defining and running programs, consisting of multiple initiatives or projects. It focuses, largely on assuring efficient execution and ensuring that interdependencies are monitored and accounted for and resolves contention problems. | Discipline | |
| Project Management | A discipline for defining and running individual projects or initiatives. | Discipline | |
| Project Management Institute (PMI) | A non-profit organization focused on Project Management techniques and practices. It publishes the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBoK) and provides certifications in numerous practice areas. | Governance | Organizations |
| Project Portfolio Management | A discipline in which prospective initiatives, whether at the program or project level are managed as a group, or portfolio. Periodically, the portfolio is reviewed, and the items in it prioritized by criteria determined by the company. At intervals, optimally as soon as resources become available, items are released from the portfolio for execution. | Discipline | |
| Proof of Concept (PoC) | An experimental project designed to explore the viability of a product idea or a solution to a challenge or problem. | Business | |
| Question Mark | From the Boston Consulting Group market-share growth model: A product or line of business that has not attained a substantial market share in a growing market. A company must decide whether the product or line of business is worth investing in in order to attain greater market share or not. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Refactoring | Restructuring existing software code to improve its design or structure without modifying its behavior or functionality. | Technology | Architecture |
| Repository | An information store that may take a multitude of forms, from simple text files to databases to data lakes. | Technology | |
| REST APIs | Representational State Transfer Advanced Programming Interfaces–a software integration protocol that takes advantage of the internet’s HTTP protocols. It is standards based, is very widely used and simplifies integrating software components and services. | Technology | Architecture |
| Retrospective Analysis | Also called ‘lessons learned’ or ‘after-action reviews,’ retrospectives are reviews of how work was performed or the impact of policies or procedures to judge efficacy and identify opportunities for improvement. | Discipline | |
| Risk | The possibility that a sub-optimal or negative result will occur when a company exposes capital or other resources to loss by pursuing an initiative or a line of business. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Risk Appetite | The definition of how much in the way of losses or negative consequences a company is willing to expose itself to on an ongoing basis in order to pursue profits or rewards. For instance, a restaurant may expect to achieve 12% net earnings but is willing to live with 5% net loss from time-to-time on its ongoing operation. A commodity trading business might expect 20% earnings but could abide a 30% net loss on occasion. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Risk Assessment | The process of identifying, analyzing and determining treatments for risks. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Risk Controls | The implementation of treatments defined for risks. These may include Accepting, Avoiding, Mitigating or Transferring a risk. Controls may also include prescribed steps to be taken to minimize the potential for negative events or maximize the potential for positive ones and to minimize or maximize, the impacts from them. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Risk Register | A repository of identified risks which may contain a variety of information, such as analysis, impact estimates, description of controls and assignment of responsibilities for monitoring a risk and managing the controls that are established for dealing with it. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Risk Tolerance | The definition of how much in the way of incremental losses or negative consequences, beyond its stated risk tolerance, a company is willing to expose itself to for a limited period or for a specific opportunity in order to pursue a one-time or limited-availability profit or reward. A commodity trading business might be willing to accept the possibility of a 75% loss on a long position in order to have a chance to realize a 200% gain on a trade. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Risk/Reward Analysis | A quantitative assessment of competing risk-adjusted values at play in a given situation. Buying insurance, for instance, has a cost and benefit–the premium is a known cost and the benefit limits or even eliminates a potential loss. The probability of the loss figures heavily into the imputed value of the benefit and the risk/reward analysis compares the values of the two. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Risk-Based Decision-Making | The discipline of incorporating risk considerations into decision-making to ensure that the company is not taking unrecognized or poorly-understood risks in attempts to attain rewards. | Discipline | |
| Risk-Based Thinking | The discipline of balancing risks and rewards, which underlies risk-based decision-making. It is predicated on identifying, analyzing and understanding risks that may attach to a company’s operations or prospective initiatives. | Discipline | |
| Roadmap, Roadmapping | The discipline of planning a sequence of initiatives to optimize the path to prioritized goals while minimizing the risks associated with the journey. | Discipline | |
| Robotic Process Automation (RPA) | Consists of software bots that can interface with and operate other applications, eliminating the need to have a human operator perform manual tasks. The tasks most suited to RPA are established and rules-based. | Technology | Process Automation |
| SAfE | Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise is an approach to managing multiple Lean/Agile development teams. | Technology | Development |
| Scenario Analysis | An approach involving defining alternative views of the future, usually in order to inform plan development for a company’s evolution. | Discipline | |
| Scrum | An Agile software development approach. | Technology | Development |
| Serverless Function | A function that is performed by a discrete piece of code managed by a centralized service, such as AWS Lambda. It is not installed on or attached to any specific server and is instantiated, executed and then disposed of by the service when it has completed. | Technology | Architecture |
| Shelfware | A somewhat snide reference to excessive work products that are overly detailed and, once delivered, take up space on a shelf and are rarely or never used. | Technology | Architecture |
| Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) | A discipline and set of processes, originated at Google in 2003, in which DevOps-like processes are applied to application infrastructure and operations. Often, SRE teams are tied to product management teams to extend the practices that make their work agile and rapid to the operations associated with their products or services. | Technology | Development / Operations |
| SMACIT | Forces driving change today: Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and Internet of Things (IoT). From Jeanne Ross’ book, ‘Designed for Digital.’ | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Software as a Service (SaaS) | Software applications delivered over the Internet, with no need for customers to maintain or operate any of the underlying enabling infrastructure. A major advantage is often a ‘pay as you go’ model, which eliminates large up-front investment for licensing or infrastructure to support the application and ongoing monitoring and maintenance activities, which are performed by the vendor. | Technology | Architecture |
| Stage Gate | A set of conditions required to proceed from one stage of an initiative to the next, Most often associated with Waterfall projects. | Technology | Development |
| Standard Deviation, Variance | Measures that represent the dispersion of data in a sample. A good example is the graph showing two normally distributed variables with difference standard deviations. The variable with the larger standard deviation has a flatter, wider plot. | Statistical Analysis | |
| Stateful, Stateless | A protocol in which a component that provides a service does not maintain any information between invocations. This means that an application’s state (for instance remembering who is logged in or where the user is in the middle of a transaction) must be ‘remembered’ by the calling component. The advantage, architecturally, is that it simplifies the design of service-providing components, making it easier to decompose them into microservces, deploy them in containers or create serverless implementations for them. Stateful components, on the other hand, are designed to remember state information and, therefore, require more complicated implementations. | Technology | Architecture |
| Strangler Fig Pattern | A strategy for migrating a system to the cloud, creating an abstracting API interface for it and then transforming it piece by piece over time. Eventually, the interface remains, and the entire workings of the original system are decommissioned, much like a tree that is attacked by a strangler fig vine, which grows on it, eventually kills it and remains even after the host tree dies and rots away. | Technology | Architecture |
| Strategic and Competitive Analysis | A discipline in which market forces, trends and the company’s strengths and weaknesses are evaluated to identify threats and opportunities that inform the company’s plans for its evolution. | Discipline | |
| Strategy | A statement of a company’s goals and objectives. Ideally, it should also include the assumptions on which it is predicated, a roadmap describing the path intended and a definition of the KPIs by which the success of the strategy will be measured. | Enterprise Architecture | |
| Strict Uncertainty | As per Hubbard, uncertainty for which we have identified outcomes but do not have probabilities to assign to them. | Statistical Analysis | |
| Subject Matter Expert (SME) | An individual who is expert and experienced in a specific area, which can be anything relevant from technology to internal company processes and operations. | Business | |
| Sustainability | Sustainability results from Business Agility–the ability to respond to events and changes in the markets in which a company operates in a timeframe that preserves its competitiveness. Companies that cannot respond to the evolution of their markets or their competitors, gradually become uncompetitive and cannot be sustained. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| SWOT | Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat—a mnemonic for a framework in which to think about strategy. Strength often leads to Opportunities and Weakness to Threats. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC) | A generic term applied to approaches to software development. Generally speaking, there are agile and sequential approaches. | Technology | Development |
| Tagging | Application of taxonomic values to data or information objects, ensuring consistency and searchability. | Technology | Data Management |
| Taxonomy | A vocabulary that incorporates naming and classification of entities, such as the Linnean classification scheme for biology. In the context of AERM, taxonomy is a deliverable of the KM team and is employed to name and classify EA/BA entities and objects created by or of use to various actors within the company. It is crucial to facilitating reuse and avoiding redundancy and its maintenance and currency are extremely important. | Discipline | |
| Technical Architecture | The design scheme of an organization’s infrastructure, networks and application systems. Optimizing it requires balancing numerous competing and, possibly, mutually exclusive options. | Technology | Architecture |
| Technical Debt | Sub-optimal design resulting from failure to take account of all relevant considerations when defining or implementing a solution or evolving the organization. It usually results in constraints on evolution options or imposes excessive and avoidable costs or risks on building solutions in the future. | Technology | Architecture |
| Three Layers of Risks | As per the model employed in the book, there are three layers of risk: strategic risk involves the company achieving its owners’ goals (market share or profitability, say,) operational risk consists of potential variances in the execution or outcomes of the company’s operational processes and transformational risks are associated with transformation initiatives. Transformational risks end when the initiatives to which they attach do. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Three Lines of Defense Model | A model developed by the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) to assign roles and responsibilities to risk management. The first line of defense is management controls applied to day-to-day operations. The second is enterprise risk managers. The third is the Internal Audit function. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| To-Be | A future state, one to which the company may transform to achieve targeted improvements in any of a number of areas. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Treatment | A treatment is a plan to enact the strategy selected to address a risk. For instance, purchasing insurance to mitigate the impact of an event for which the company is at risk. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Treatment Strategy-Accept | A do-nothing strategy. If a risk is suitably unlikely or the impact trivial, then it may not be worth doing anything about the risk. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Treatment Strategy-Avoid | Restructuring the company or its operations so as to obviate a risk. Moving out of a location subject to flooding would enable a company to avoid that particular risk, though obviously at a cost. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Treatment Strategy-Mitigate | Enacting policies or operational processes that reduce the probability of a negative event or its impact. For instance, ceasing to perform a particular operation and instead contracting it with a 3rd-party could eliminate exposure to some elements of the risks associated with it. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Treatment Strategy-Transfer | Enacting a business arrangement in which another party assumes a risk. Insurance is such a strategy. The carrier assumes the risk of loss in exchange for a premium. | Risk/Risk Management | |
| Triple Constraint | Contends that, given finite resources, a project’s deliverables will be constrained to a space defined by functionality, cost and time. Increasing any one of them will require changes to one or both of the other two. | Technology | Development |
| Uncertainty | As per Hubbard, the lack of complete certainty about an outcome, state, result or value. This is described by a set of probabilities for various outcomes. | Statistical Analysis | |
| Value Stream | A container object in the EA model which includes the Capabilities and Enablers that are bundled and exercised to deliver a specific unit of value. For instance, a Production Value Stream encompassing production of a unit of a product would include the facility, equipment, people and inputs required. | Enterprise Architecture | |
| Value-stream Product Management | A Product Management approach optimized to deliver value to customers over completing development activities. | Business | |
| Velocity | The speed with which a company can accomplish a desired outcome. Business Agility is all about achieving greater velocity in recognizing and reacting to events, threats or opportunities. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Vertical integration | A business combination in which a parent company owns multiple businesses, some of which are suppliers to others. This is a strategy of concentration, in which the parent company can optimize its profitability by cost-shifting—reducing the profit made by suppliers to lower cost to the consuming business units. | Business | Strategy / Competition |
| Vertical Scaling | An approach to increasing processing capacity that involves replacing an existing server with a bigger one. This is inherently less elastic than horizontal scaling and creates unnecessary costs and complexities. It is most often the result of ‘lift and shift’ migrations, in which an older system was transplanted from a data center to a cloud provider but not refactored to accommodate horizontal scaling. | Technology | Architecture |
| VUCA | Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity—describes the environment in which we are all operating today | Business | |
| Waterfall | A sequential SDLC in which progress from one stage to the next is strictly stage-gated. For example, a team cannot proceed to development unless it is completely through with design and has met whatever conditions have been prescribed for that. | Technology | Development |
| Water-Scrum-Fall | What occurs when an agile project is managed within a legacy (fixed time and budget) approach. It usually results in the worst of both worlds. | Technology | Development |
| Work Order Management System | An application system that is used to monitor and manage production or assembly of products or services. Generally, Work Order Management Systems work in conjunction with Order Management Systems, which provide a view of order backlog, or outstanding demand for products. | Technology | Architecture |
| Workflow | Basically, a process, usually associated with an operational outcome. For instance, handling an insurance claim may involve review by different people, depending on the nature and magnitude of the claim. | Business | |
| XP | Extreme Programming—an early form of Agile development, many instances of which include ‘pair programming,’ in which two programmers work together on a single workstation. | Technology | Development |
| Zero-Sum Game | A situation in which multiple participants are competing for a share of a limited resource or reward. Whatever one participant gets becomes unavailable to the others. | Business | |