Topics › Enterprise architecture › The map before the data

Rules with a home: each rule written once, in the map, at the step where it applies, with an owner, a reason, and tests or a tracking table generated from it

Tartu, today: a birth is entered once in the population register, and days later the parents are offered a family benefit they never applied for, because every office asks the register: once only. Then the bill flagged wrong on Tomás's first day. The rule that should have corrected it lived in a nightly script on the wall between the network and retail, writing since March to a queue nothing reads, and it was written four more ways elsewhere, none of them its home. Split at the wall, it becomes two rules, each with an owner and a reason, written in the business's words and attached to its step of meter to cash. In ArchiMate 4, the standard the map follows, each is a requirement: its reason influences it, its step realises it, and its owner and data objects are associated with it. A rule about the data gets tests generated from it; retail's rule, about what the business does, gets a tracking table the billing team reviews each morning. Written this way, the rules are generally an ontology, ready for OWL; finding the uncorrected bill stays the tracking table's job.

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