large areas, called domains, which represent key concepts of interest to every information and communications enterprise. The domains include concepts such as Market/Sales, Product, Customer, Service, Resource, Supplier/Partner, and Enterprise as shown in Figure 1.01

Similar to the Business Process Framework’s (eTOM) framework that provides a decomposition of business processes, the SID is organized into a framework that represents a decomposition of information.

The SID provides a standard way of structuring, defining, and implementing information and behavior.

Presented here are techniques that can be employed when moving to the physical perspective. The use of these techniques minimizes the impact of adopting new versions of the SID, while supporting improved performance and a more consolidated, simplified view of the SID.

The various types of usage (product, service, and resource) may just represent states, or stages, in the life cycle of a usage record. In this case the second option (bottom-up) may be chosen, with the associations to product, service, and resource representing the states in the life of usage as it is guided to a product.

Explicit Modeling Versus Characteristics

Consolidating entities from the “top” down • Consolidating entities from the “bottom” up • Consolidating entities from the “middle” – top down and bottom up • Consolidating entities using a “type” attribute.

Aggregate Business Entity (ABE) – a well-defined set of information that characterizes a highly cohesive set of business entities that are loosely coupled with entities in other ABEs

is interesting to note that while the SID Framework is presented as a top-down decomposition, it was actually developed from the bottom up!