The EA⁶ Cube Specification V1.0 formalises a six-faced enterprise architecture framework developed by John Gøtze and taught at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software and Societal Systems Department.
Download the EA6 Cube Specification v1.
Where the classic EA³ Cube used three faces to describe structure and function, EA⁶ names and populates all six, adding Organisational Structure, Risk Management, Markets & Valuation, Human Capital, and Products & Services to the original Architecture Layers.
The specification’s central insight is the structural isomorphism of four side faces: Faces 2, 3, 4, and 5 each contain exactly five rows mirroring the five architecture layers, enabling any enterprise to be examined through four orthogonal lenses — what it does, what can go wrong, what it is worth, and who knows how — at exactly the same level of abstraction. Twenty composite viewpoints, each selecting three of the six faces, provide sixty design patterns covering challenges from GDPR compliance and M&A due diligence to DevOps transformation and product portfolio risk.
A companion set of ten formal extension modules brings the specification from a conceptual framework to an implementable metamodel. The extensions define typed attributes and cardinality constraints for every class (Modules 1–2), 104 OCL/SHACL invariants (Module 3), a 76-artifact documentation catalogue with coverage model (Module 4), eleven state machines governing entity lifecycles and their cross-face cascades (Module 5), the Locus coordinate and coLocatedWith relation that make the isomorphism navigable (Module 6), sixteen instance-level mapping relations covering all fifteen face pairs (Module 7), CompositeViewpoint as a first-class graph structure with adjacency, traversal, and the corner/edge classification (Module 8), Type and Scope dimensional axes integrated into the class hierarchy (Module 9), and serialisation in OWL/RDF, JSON Schema, and ArchiMate 3.2 (Module 10).