A business artifact is a unit of functionality and forms a modular building block. Each artifact encompasses five dimensions:

• a business artifact is an entity that encapsulates two inherent properties: state and behavior. It may have relationships with other entities.

• a business artifact has a life cycle that can iterate between defined states.

• each business artifact is manageable as an independent entity, based on a defined governance model.

• a business artifact provides value to other business artifacts.

• business artifacts may be composed to create compositions, that themselves can be further composed into higher level capabilities without the need to resort to programming.

Typical examples of business artifacts are:

• data-oriented artifacts, such as surname, post code, city name, etc.

• process-oriented artifacts, such as process start event, XOR gateway, state transition, etc.

• presentation-oriented artifacts, such as text field, button, menu item, etc.

Artifacts rely on a composition model. A composition model is a set of specifications that define how to construct an individual artifact, and it defines how artifacts communicate and interact with each other. In addition, a composition model specifies how an artifact makes its services available to others.

Artifact composition or assembly is the combination of two or more artifacts that yields new behavior. We need a specification that describes how artifacts are composed to form larger artifacts, i.e. how composition is performed. In fact, composition is considered a central issue in composition-driven engineering, which is one of the enterprise engineering disciplines.

The composition specification guides the creation of a larger structure by connecting artifacts within an existing structure. It defines a composition model that describes a declarative way of representing the relationships between artifacts.

The Integrated Composition and Execution Environment (ICEE) implements artifact and composition models and provides a composition infrastructure. The business analyst assumes the role of a composer who interacts with the ICEE to perform “plug-and-play composition”, that is dynamic composition.

Business artifacts and compositions form the business vocabulary. Thus, viewed from a different angle, the business vocabulary represents entities of various types: artifacts and compositions representing data, processes, business capabilities, etc.

From an organizational perspective, business artifacts and compositions represent building blocks, parts of reality within the enterprise. They may also thought of forming enterprise knowledge assets, that is intellectual capital assets.

Clearly, artifacts and compositions must be stored and managed in a repository, implemented by a physical data store. This composition registry and repository would ideally be pre-loaded with an extensive set of pre-built and ready-to-use standard artifacts and compositions, such as surname, country code, and invoice address. The existence of standard artifacts and compositions that are needed by virtually any company would help speed up the enterprise change management process. It would also mark the departure from "reinventing the wheel" each time, and it requires thinking in terms of the enterprise as a whole rather than single systems.

The goal of composition-driven enterprise engineering is to increase productivity, quality and facilitate real-time enterprise change management, which encompasses shortening time-to-market of new products and services, quickly reacting to falling profit margins, etc.

We will examine the conceptual foundations of a few software products that have the potential to deliver on the promise of composition-driven enterprise engineering.