Systems
The vocabulary Ahrom uses to model a business. These are the terms the architecture is built from.
Structure
- Entity
- A distinct thing the business tracks: a customer, an order, an employee, an asset. Entities are the nouns the rest of the system refers to.
- Relationship
- A defined connection between two entities, such as which customer placed which order. Relationships are modeled directly, not inferred from matching IDs across separate tables.
- Workflow
- A sequence of steps that moves an entity from one state to another, with a defined owner at each step.
- Dependency
- A requirement that one step, entity, or workflow places on another before it can proceed.
Governance
- Permission
- A rule defining who can view, change, or act on a given entity or workflow step, defined once and enforced everywhere that entity appears.
- Business rule
- A constraint the business enforces regardless of which application is being used, such as an approval threshold or an eligibility condition.
- State transition
- A recorded change in an entity's status, such as an order moving from placed to fulfilled, along with what caused the change.
Truth
- Data
- The recorded facts a business has about its entities and events, structured according to the model rather than scattered across tools.
- Decision
- A choice made by a person or a system that changes what happens next, tracked as its own record rather than only its downstream effect.
- Evidence
- The data and events that justified a decision, kept attached to that decision so the reasoning can be reviewed later.
- Cross-department process
- A workflow that spans more than one team, such as sales handing off to fulfillment, modeled as one continuous process rather than as separate steps in separate tools.
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