[1] An enterprise is a complex socio-technical system that comprises people, information, and technology that interact with each other and their environment in support of a common mission.
[5] Encompassing "the application of knowledge, principles, and disciplines related to the analysis, design, implementation and operation of all elements associated with an enterprise.
In software development, enterprise engineering deals with the modelling and integration of various organizational and technical parts of business processes and functions.
[8] Here, enterprise modelling can form part of the early, middle and late information system development life cycle.
[3] Enterprise engineering involves formal methodologies, methods and techniques which are designed, tested and used extensively in order to offer organizations reusable business process solutions: These methodologies, techniques and methods are all more or less suited to modeling an enterprise and its underlying processes.
CIMOSA provides templates and interconnected modeling constructs to encode business, people and information technology (IT) aspects of enterprise requirements.
It shows information needs for different enterprise functions such as activities, processes and operations alongside their corresponding resources.
Over the past decades a number of tools and techniques for the integration of these different notations have been developed incrementally.
As a result, Petri Nets can be used to model certain business processes with corresponding state and transitions or activities therein as well as outputs.
In recent years research has shown that Petri Nets can contribute to the development of business process integration.
Sometimes these are called “enterprise building blocks” and includes resources, processes, goals, rules and metamodels.
In response, the object oriented community makes business extensions for UML and adapts the language accordingly.
In this way EFD has many similarities with IDEF0 diagrams, which also represent business processes in a hierarchical fashion as a combination of functions and triggers.