Search the practice set
275 questions, 991 terms and 600 topics in 30 areas.
60 results for “Business Glossary”
Term Definition Ownership
Assigning one accountable owner per business term, so that a disagreement about meaning has a route to resolution rather than a standing argument.
Business Capability
What a business does, expressed stably and independently of how it currently does it or who is responsible.
Business Case Structure
The argument format that gets technical investment funded — problem, options, quantified benefit, cost, risk and a recommendation.
Business Domain Boundary
A division of the business into areas with distinct language, ownership and rates of change, used as the primary input to system and team boundaries.
Business Impact Analysis
Determining which business processes must be restored, how quickly, and what the consequence of not doing so is — the input from which recovery targets are derived.
Business Metric Instrumentation
Emitting metrics for business outcomes — orders, payments, signups — alongside technical telemetry, so incidents can be detected and prioritised by impact.
Application Portfolio Management
Maintaining an inventory of every application with its owner, cost, business value and technical health, and using it to decide what to invest in, replace or retire.
Attribute History Strategy
The per-attribute decision about whether history is overwritten, versioned or kept alongside the current value, which is a business question rather than a technical one.
Booking.com's Experimentation Platform
Booking.com runs over a thousand concurrent experiments and treats the ability to test any change safely as a platform capability rather than a product feature.
Capability Map
A structured view of everything a business does, used as the stable frame for mapping applications, investment, ownership and gaps.
Capability Maturity Assessment
Rating each business capability on how well it is currently performed, so investment can be directed at the gap between importance and maturity.
Capability Model
A structured map of what a business does, independent of how it is organised or which systems support it, used to align technology investment with function.
Capability-to-Application Mapping
Linking each business capability to the systems that support it, which is what converts two inventories into an analysis tool.
Commercial Literacy
Sufficient understanding of how the business makes money and what it is measured on to translate technical work into terms that compete for funding.
Compensating Transaction
A business operation that semantically undoes a previously committed step — not a rollback, because the original effect was visible and may not be fully reversible.
Consistency Level Selection
Choosing the consistency guarantee per operation rather than per system, matching the cost of coordination to the business consequence of staleness.
Cost Per Transaction
Infrastructure cost divided by business volume, which reveals efficiency trends that absolute spend conceals.
Cost of Delay
What it costs the business per unit of time that a piece of work is not delivered, which is the input that makes prioritisation an economic decision.
Cost of Downtime
The quantified business impact of unavailability per unit of time, which converts reliability investment from an argument into an arithmetic comparison.
Decomposition by Capability
Breaking a monolithic system into parts along business capability lines rather than technical layers, so that each part changes for one reason.
Demand Forecasting
Projecting future load from historical trends, business plans and known events, and translating it into resource requirements with explicit lead times.
A 15-year-old monolith runs the core of the business. Leadership wants microservices. How do you approach it, and what would make you refuse?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you start from the business problem or from the target architecture, and whether you are willing to say no. First, estab
A business continuity manager asks for your disaster recovery plan. You give them the RTO/RPO matrix and they say it is not what they need. What is missing?
They are asking about the business process, not the system Disaster recovery restores technology. Business continuity keeps the business operating, which includ
A business sponsor asks for a real-time data platform because "the competition has one". Reporting is currently a nightly batch that lands at 06:00 and nobody has complained. How do you handle this?
Do not answer the technology question "Real time platform" is a solution, and it has arrived without a problem attached. Answering it directly leads either to a
A business unit wants an assistant answering questions from 200,000 internal documents. They ask whether to fine-tune a model or use retrieval. How do you decide?
Retrieval, for this requirement, and the reasoning is not about quality Four properties decide it: Freshness. Documents change. Retrieval reflects a change as s
A core mainframe system with no API supports nightly batch file exchange only. The business needs near-real-time order status. Design the integration.
Establish the real constraint "No API" usually means no API the mainframe team will build on your timeline . Find out what exists: message queue interfaces, dat
A deployed model performed well in validation and its business metric has declined over four months. Nothing has been deployed. What do you investigate?
The model did not change; its world did Three distinct causes, and they need different responses: Data drift. The input distribution has moved — a new customer
A team wants to build a new internal API on serverless functions. It will serve steady traffic of about 200 requests per second during business hours. What do you advise?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can apply the serverless trade off to a specific workload rather than treating it as a default good or a default bad
A twenty-year-old core system supports most of the business. It is on unsupported technology, three people understand it, and the last replacement attempt was abandoned after two years. Design the programme.
Learn from the abandoned attempt first The most important input is why the last one failed, and the reasons are usually structural rather than technical: a big
Engineering says the codebase is full of technical debt. The business hears "we want to stop delivering and tidy up". How do you reframe it?
The word is the problem "Technical debt" means nothing to a business audience, and where it means something it sounds like tidying. It also covers three genuine
Security wants mandatory hardware keys for every login; the business says it will cost conversions. How do you resolve it architecturally rather than by picking a side?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you treat security as a fixed dial to be turned up, or as a risk proportionate design variable. Both stated positions ar
The business asks for "100% uptime" for a new customer portal. Walk me through the conversation that ends in an agreed SLO.
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can run a negotiation that ends in a number both sides own, rather than either capitulating or lecturing about nines
The business asks for "multi-region" after a regional outage. Before agreeing, what do you need to establish, and what are you actually signing up for?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you convert a vague requirement into numbers before designing, and whether you know that multi region is primarily a dat
The business asks for multi-region active-active. Walk through the decision and what it actually requires.
Establish what problem it solves Multi region addresses region wide failure and global latency . It does not address bad deployments, data corruption, configura
The business has selected a SaaS product. You are asked to review the integration architecture after the contract is signed. What do you do?
Accept the position and be useful within it The selection cannot be reopened, and arguing about the process will spend credibility for nothing. What can still c
The business wants to deploy a model that ranks loan applications, with a credit officer making the final decision. What must the architecture provide, and what will you insist on before go-live?
Classify first, because it determines everything else This decides access to credit for individuals. Under any consequence based classification it is high risk:
A CFO asks why the architecture function should be funded when it ships no features. You have five minutes. What do you say?
Do not answer with activities "We produce standards, run a review board and maintain the technology radar" describes what the function does, not what the busine
A startup asks you to architect their product "to handle millions of users". They currently have none. What do you actually build?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can identify the real constraint. The stated requirement is scale; the actual constraint is survival, and an archite
Customers reported an outage 40 minutes before your monitoring did. How do you close that gap?
What the gap tells you Every technical signal was green while users were failing. That is not a threshold tuning problem; it means the system was monitoring com
Delivery feels slow and leadership wants a productivity initiative. You propose mapping the value stream first. What will you map and what do you expect to find?
Map every step from request to delivered change, with two numbers each Work time — how long the step actually takes when someone is doing it. Wait time — how lo
Business Glossary
Agreeing what a term means before arguing about which number is right.
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.
Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
Business Metrics
Orders per minute alongside error rate, because healthy is not enough.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
Business Understanding
Connecting a design to the outcome that pays for it.
Modernisation Business Case
Pricing tail risk so deferred maintenance becomes fundable.
API Gateways
The single entry point, and the business logic that must stay out of it.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.