Domain Modelling and the Co-Design of Business Rules in the Telecommunication Business Area

This paper discusses the development of an enterprise domain model in an environment where part of the domain knowledge is vague and not yet formalised in company-wide business rules. The domain model was developed for a young company starting in the telecommunications sector. The company relied on a number of stand-alone business support systems and sought for a manner to integrate them. There was opted for the development of an enterprise-wide domain model that had to serve as an integration layer to coordinate the stand-alone applications. A specific feature of the company was that it could build up its information infrastructure form scratch, so that many aspects of its business were still in the process of being defined. The paper will highlight parts of the Enterprise Model where there was a need for co-designing business rules together with the domain model. A result of this whole effort was that the company got more insight into important domain knowledge and developed a common understanding across functional areas of the way of doing business.