First and foremost, the Enterprise Application Model is a design tool.
The Enterprise Application Model
The Enterprise Application Model helps guide you step by step through the process of designing and building a large-scale commercial application, by organizing the hundreds or thousands of design requirements into a small number of sub-models, and showing how they fit together. It shows how to balance the competing requirements of every design decision. This lets you build up the application in small incremental steps, working in any order that seems appropriate, with the confidence that every design choice integrates smoothly with the overall application architecture.
The following sections present the individual sub-models, and show how to understand the interactions among their various requirements:
| Section | Description |
| How the Sub-Models Help You Design | Presents the Enterprise Application Model and discusses the interactions among each of its sub-models. |
| Business Model | Defines the role of business requirements in the design and development of enterprise applications. |
| User Model | Shows how the user requirements of an enterprise application are identified, along with their impact on design and development. |
| Logical Model | Identifies the elements of logical design in building the application, including the creation of abstract business objects and the services they provide. |
| Technology Model | Presents the scope of technology decisions that enter into enterprise development, and discusses building or reusing components, deployment platforms, and other technology options. |
| Physical Model | Shows how the application's physical architecture evolves from the successive inputs of each sub-model. |
| Development Model | Presents the team and process models for enterprise development, and shows how they iteratively interact with each of the other sub-models. |