3. The Enterprise and Its World

We’ll start the modeling exercise with some entities that can be specified without interviewing anyone. You know that they will be required, no matter what the business.

An enterprise cannot exist without people. Whether an employee, a vendor agent, or the president of a company, a PERSON can be assumed to be a “thing of significance” to most companies. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the PERSON entity will appear on virtually all data models for all companies. Oh, there may be pressure to name it something different, like EMPLOYEE, CUSTOMER, AGENT, or whatever. But ultimately, the thing of significance is a PERSON, and as a modeler, you will save a lot of time by simply putting that entity on the diagram ...

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