Must Know Cold & Must Distinguish
Must know cold
- Data Architecture: identify enterprise data needs and design/maintain master blueprints to meet them.
- Bridge: business strategy ↔ Data Architecture ↔ technology execution.
- Three components: outcomes/artifacts; activities; behavior.
- Four EA domains: Business, Data, Application, Technology.
- Zachman: What, How, Where, Who, When, Why; ontology, not methodology.
- Enterprise Data Architecture: EDM + Data Flow Design.
- Vertical mapping: abstraction-level model lineage.
- Horizontal mapping: same-level cross-model relationships.
- Practice work streams: strategy; acceptance/culture; organization; working methods; results.
- Roadmap: pragmatic roughly 3–5 year development path.
- Implementation paths: buy, reuse, build.
- Lifecycle: be able to classify the eight status terms, especially Preferred/Emerging/Containment/Retirement.
- Architecture governance: oversee projects; manage designs/lifecycle/tools; define standards; create data artifacts.
- Metrics: compliance; implementation trends; business value.
Must distinguish
| A | B | Deciding clue |
|---|---|---|
| Data Architecture | Data Modeling & Design | enterprise blueprint/roadmap/alignment vs specific model/design execution |
| EDM | Data Flow Design | meaning/relationships vs movement/storage/transformation/context |
| Enterprise conceptual/logical | Project logical/physical | common enterprise semantics vs scoped/implementation-specific design |
| Vertical linkage | Horizontal linkage | across abstraction levels vs same-level peer models |
| Current state | Target state | what exists vs intended future |
| Target state | Transition state | destination vs intermediate migration condition |
| Framework | Roadmap | structure for thinking vs sequence for evolution |
| Zachman ontology | Methodology | classifies artifacts vs prescribes how to create them |
| Quality-oriented | Innovation-oriented | prevent deterioration/standardize vs transform/explore new opportunities |
| Preferred | Emerging | recommended now vs researched/piloted |
| Architecture governance | Project execution | set/oversee requirements vs implement solution |
| Compliance metric | Implementation metric | followed standards/process vs actual estate evolution |
| Implementation metric | Business-value metric | changed estate/reuse/retire vs improved enterprise outcome |
Selective memorization
Memorize exactly: - definition, - three components, - four domains, - six Zachman interrogatives, - EDM vs flow, - vertical vs horizontal, - five work streams, - roadmap duration, - lifecycle labels, - four governance activities, - three metric families.
Understand rather than recite every figure example, risk wording, or diagram rule. The exam value is being able to recognize what those examples demonstrate.