Acquisition or development of enterprise application software requires close collaboration between organization and IT from the beginning. A common understanding of the business infrastructure is absolutely necessary. Technical aspects are less important during the early project stages.

From a business viewpoint, the business infrastructure is composed of the following major elements:

• Organizational model (organizational structure);
• Business vocabulary;
• Semantic core components;
  
• Business processes;
• Business rules;
• Business documents;
• Business resources;
• Services.

The organizational model represents how an organization is structured to comply with a strategic plan. In broad terms, it visualizes the link between the goals of the enterprise and how managers and staff are working to achieve those objectives.

It deals with the allocation of tasks, reporting relationships and levels to provide a means of achieving full organizational alignment between the "people" aspects and the "function". This alignment refers to the complete integration of jobs, skills and people with the goals, function and structure of the environment on an ongoing basis.

An organization needs to have  a clear and trusted representation of how information is used across the organization. A business vocabulary contains names and relationships among the names.

In a typical organization, organization units seem to have their own terms for things like customers, consumers and suppliers. For example, the terms "location", "site", "branch" and "business unit" may be used by different people and have the same meaning. A business vocabulary forms an agreement between business and IT. Its focus is the enterprise-wide entities.

The corrects use of a business vocabulary will provide managers and staff with a common view of data from across the various parts of the organization. Users will see the same information with the same semantic meaning and the same values.

Semantic core components represent building blocks of varying size and complexity. Some are very small and atomic (e.g. "organization unit name"), while others aggregate concepts (e.g. "invoice total", which associates a numeric value with a currency) or components (e.g. "address").

Business processes fall into three categories: management processes, operational processes and supporting processes. It is certainly impossible to get into any depth about even the most prominent concepts and activities that are involved with the business process life-cycle, such as business process modeling, business process execution, and business process optimization.

Business rules describe the operation, definitions and constraints that apply to an organization in achieving its goals. Business rules are a means by which business strategies are implemented. They can provide the tactical detail about exactly how a strategy will translate to actions. 

For example, an organization has a pricing policy that is determined by the country where the business partner resides and the business volume. A business rule may state that "gold customers" get a 10% discount, "silver customers get" a 5% discount, and "bronze customers" get no discount.

Business processes involve the automated transfer of business documents between requesting and responding process tasks. A business document, such as an order, delivery slip, or invoice, is composed of semantic core components.

Business resources, such as printers, scanners, are elements of the technical infrastructure, which provides the technical foundation for the execution of business processes.

Services provide a discretely defined set of contiguous and autonomous business or technical functionality. Services are associated with process activities (a.k.a. process tasks) and are invoked at run-time by the business process engine.

Both software acquisition and development require due consideration of all aspects of the business infrastructure, since they are all closely interrelated. Negligence of one or more aspects in the early project stages bears the danger of unwelcome surprises later on in the process - when it may be too late.

The business infrastructure forms the underpinning for all kinds of enterprise application software, such as: Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Partner Relationship Management (PRM). Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Master Data Management (MDM).

Jenz & Partner has created a Requirements Package, which contains a collection of functional (a.k.a. behavioral) business infrastructure-related requirements. The Requirements Package is constantly being updated and enhanced to reflect technology advances.