When a model consists of many concepts and relations, structuring a model helps to
reduce the visual complexity of the model, which makes it easier for your
stakeholders to recognise and understand your model. Structuring a model may
also help to discover recurring structures, patterns, or inconsistencies.
Especially in an enterprise architecture, which integrates many different
domains, several of these structures will be apparent at the same time. However,
different structures will be dominant in different parts of the enterprise architecture.
For example, in business processes a temporal structure will be dominant, whereas
functional decomposition is more prominent in the application architecture.
Architecture models may contain different types of structure. Commonly used
structural dimensions include: