How to bridge the gap between business and Information Technology (IT) has always been a critical issue for both the developers and IT managers. The individualized, differentiated demands by different customers and situations, the constantly changing in both business and IT are great challenges to the applications for enterprises. In this chapter, the authors respectively discuss the left side (computer) in software engineering, with Object-Orientation (OO), Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), Domain-Driven Development (DDD), Agile, etc., and the right side (the business) in Enterprise Engineering (EE) with Enterprise Modeling (EM), and Enterprise Architecture (EA) of the gap. It is shown there are some fundamental problems, such as the transforming barrier between analysis and design model, the entanglement of business change and development process, and the limitation to the enterprise engineering approaches such as EA by IT. Our solution is concentrated on the middle, the inevitable model as a mediator between human, computer, and the real world. The authors introduce Model-Driven Application (MDApp), which is based on Model-Driven Mechanism (MDM), operated on the evolutionary model of the target thing at runtime; it is able to largely avoid the transforming barrier and remove the entanglement. Thus, the architecture for Enterprise Model Driven Application (EMDA) is emerged, which is able to strongly support EE and adapts to the business changing at runtime.
A Decision Support System for Enterprise Engineering