Enterprise Solutions Structure

Enterprise Solutions Structure (ESS) is a major IBM initiative to establish a standard architectural framework to support creation, reuse, and maintenance of architecture and design assets for developing and delivering enterprise solutions. It draws on experiences with building customer solutions to distill "best practice" structures, models, and methods. The framework provides a rich set of architectural building blocks for solution architects and provides guidance on when and how to use this content to advantage. This paper gives an overview of ESS, describes the advantages of this approach, and serves as an introduction and context for some of the other papers in the issue.