Enterprise engineering is defined as the body of knowledge, principles, and practices to design whole or part of an enterprise. An enterprise is a complex, socio-technical system that comprises interdependent resources of people, information, and technology that must interact with each other and their environment in support of a common mission. According to Kosanke, Vernadat and Zelm, enterprise engineering is an enterprise life-cycle oriented discipline for the identification, design, and implementation of enterprises and their continuous evolution, supported by enterprise modelling. Enterprise engineering is a subdiscipline of industrial engineering / systems engineering. The discipline examines each aspect of the enterprise, including business processes, information flows, material flows, and organizational structure. Enterprise engineering may focus on the design of the enterprise as a whole, or on the design and integration of certain business components.
In theory and practice more types of enterprise engineering have emerged. In the field of engineering, a more general form of enterprise engineering has emerged. Encompassing "the application of knowledge, principles, and disciplines related to the analysis, design, implementation and operation of all elements associated with an enterprise. In essence this is an interdisciplinary field which combines systems engineering and strategic management as it seeks to engineer the entire enterprise in terms of the products, processes and business operations,". this field is related to engineering management, operations management, service management and systems engineering.
In the context of software development, a specific field of enterprise engineering has also appeared that deals with the modelling and integration of various organizational and technical parts of business processes and functions. In the context of information systems development, this has become an area of activity for the organization of systems analysis, and an extension to the existing scope of Information Modelling. It can also be viewed as an extension and generalization of the systems analysis and systems design phases of the software development process. Here, enterprise modelling can form part of the early, middle and late information system development life cycle. Explicit representation of the organizational and technical system infrastructure is being developed in order to understand the orderly transformations of existing work practices. This discipline is also known as Enterprise architecture, or along with Enterprise ontology, defined as being one of the two major sub-fields of Enterprise architecture.