Actor

Intro

An Actor represents a person, role, or system that participates in a process or use case. In enterprise architecture, actors help define responsibilities and interactions across business and IT.

Key points:

• Clarifies who or what initiates and consumes actions
• Supports consistent modelling of roles, systems, and stakeholders
• Common use cases: BPM swimlanes, use‑case diagrams, service consumers/providers, application interaction, tech endpoints
• Pitfall: mixing roles and systems without distinction causes ambiguity

Examples:

• Customer actor initiating an online order process
• Billing system actor producing invoices
• Support agent role actor resolving incidents

In practice:

With OrbusInfinity, teams link this concept across strategy, processes, applications, and technology for traceability.

Related terms: Role; Stakeholder; Application

FAQs:

Q: Are actors always people?
A: No — actors can be roles, applications, or external systems.

Q: Why model actors?
A: To define responsibilities and interfaces between business and IT.

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