This type of approach can be great. It is parallel to the idea to the "business is an exchange of documents", and the documents represent "transactions" in the sense of "an invoice", "a packing slip", "a deposit slip", "an order", etc.
> "business is an exchange of documents"
Did you just make up this phrase? It's really good!
You would probably like reading [1] by Dan North.
Imagine you want to implement a vacation-booking service
as part of an enterprise system. The first step is to
remove any reference to computers or modern technology.
This will allow you to concentrate on the business
objectives of the service, without getting sidetracked by
technological considerations. In other words, it enables
you to separate the “what” from the “how.”
I've been saying it for a while. I talked to the developers of this product about a decade ago:
and that was the thinking behind how that system was built. Also this is the paradigm behind
http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/
and it must predate the computer.
I'd love some feedback on this approach. How do other people allow efficient mass changes?