In a service-oriented architecture of business applications, you ideally initially model your application prior to implementation. This means that you can answer fundamental questions such as:

A governance process ensures that by using models, all services are always identified and defined in the same way, thus avoiding redundancies.

The models are not system-landscape-specific. Later on, they provide useful information when implementing services, as well as during any configuration that may be required. Furthermore, the models document different aspects of a business process, increase understanding of applications across departments and businesses thereby reducing costs when applications need to be changed or enhanced in a later release.

There are two modeling environments in the Enterprise Services Repository: