Within the six artefact types of the Alignment Matrix, one distinction cuts across the entire grid and determines everything about how artefacts are produced, who can update them, and what governance process they require. This is the distinction between Action Artefacts and Reality Artefacts.
Reality artefacts: documenting what is
Reality Artefacts document objective facts about the current IT estate. The primary example is IT Landscapes: landscape diagrams showing which systems exist and how they relate, application inventories recording system metadata, enterprise system portfolios mapping IT assets against business capabilities.
The content of a Reality Artefact is either accurate or inaccurate. There is no planning decision being represented. An individual architect, working with appropriate data sources, can produce and update a Reality Artefact without requiring collective agreement. The governance question for Reality Artefacts is quality control: is this correct and current? The key risk is staleness.
Action artefacts: representing planning decisions
Action Artefacts represent planning decisions — choices about what the organisation should do, how it should work, what it should build, or what technical standards it should follow. Business Factors contain decisions about operating principles. Business Visions contain decisions about strategic direction. Business Outlines contain decisions about which initiatives to fund. IT Designs contain decisions about how solutions will be built. IT Standards contain decisions about which technologies are acceptable.
Planning decisions are not true or false — they are agreed or contested. They can only be legitimately made through collective agreement among the people who will act on them and live with their consequences. The governance question for Action Artefacts is legitimacy: has this been genuinely agreed by the right stakeholders? The key risk is illegitimacy — a document that represents one architect's preferred direction, not an organisational commitment.
The illegitimacy failure mode: An IT Design produced by a single architect without involving the business stakeholders who will use the system, the project team that will build it, or the domain architects who must maintain the resulting landscape is not a legitimate planning decision — regardless of its technical quality. Stakeholders who were not involved will route around it during delivery.
A subtlety in IT Landscapes
IT Landscapes are primarily Reality Artefacts, but they contain elements that function as planning decisions: lifecycle classifications (marking a technology as strategic or to be decommissioned), portfolio assessments, and rationalisation recommendations. Those elements are Action Artefact content within a Reality Artefact container, and they require Forum endorsement accordingly.
Factual updates — adding a new system delivered last month, updating a version number — do not require governance. Strategic classifications — marking a system for decommission, elevating a technology to strategic status — do. Architecture teams that apply Forum governance to all Landscape updates create bureaucracy without value. Teams that apply no governance to Landscape updates allow strategic decisions to enter the record without organisational commitment.
The practical implication
Before beginning any artefact development activity, identify whether the output is primarily a Reality Artefact or an Action Artefact. This determines the development process: individual technical work for Reality Artefacts, D-E-A stakeholder engagement for Action Artefacts. It determines who to involve, how long to allow, and which governance body will endorse the result.
Treating planning decisions as if they were facts — producing Standards and Designs unilaterally and expecting compliance — is the most common failure mode in IT-focused architecture functions. Treating facts as if they required collective agreement — running every Landscape update through a committee — is the most common source of EA bureaucracy that consumes time without adding value.