ITPEC FE Morning April 2020 Question 61

Data architecture — enterprise architecture describes an organisation in four layers: business, data, application and technology.

• •Business architecture — the business processes, functions and organisation

• •Data architecture — what information the business uses, its structure and how the data relate (data models, data dictionaries)

• •Application architecture — the information systems that support the business and how they connect

• •Technology architecture — the hardware, networks and platforms the applications run on

The question names business, technology and application, so the missing layer is data.

Answer (b)

Why not others:

• •(a) Bus architecture — the design of a hardware bus that links components inside a computer, not a layer of an organisation's architecture
• •(c) Software architecture — the internal structure of one software product; in EA the software view is the application architecture
• •(d) System architecture — the overall design of a single system, a general engineering term rather than one of the four EA layers

Key rule: Enterprise architecture runs top-down from business to data to applications to technology (BDAT), so each lower layer serves the one above it.

System Strategy · AI-written, may contain errors