The "what" of Business Architecture, commonly known as ‘data’

‘Things of Interest’ to a business means a business wants to remember what it knows about those things. In a business model (the next row down in Zachman), this means defining what data about things that the business needs to capture and use, leading to definitions of files and databases in the subsequent System Model.

 The most common format used to capture data requirements is the Entity-Relationship Diagram, which like Architecture, was most popularized by the Information Engineering Methodology. The main component is the Data Entity, a subject of interest to the Business, associated by the business relationships between them. Each entity contains data items/attributes that relate to or describe the Entity. Each attribute belongs only to one Entity, so duplication of data is reduced.