Take one record and cut down through everything it touches.

What the record acquires, and what it would otherwise cost.

1. The organization

   The organizational model

   A place. The record belongs to a unit, and the unit is a node in the one tree every domain reads — so “which department” means the same thing in finance as it does in the warehouse.

   Each domain would keep its own department list, and reconciling them would become a permanent job. A reorganisation would have to be performed once per system.

2. Authority

   How authority resolves

   A rule about who may touch it. Not a copy of a permission — the seat it belongs to, resolved against the licence and the privileges of whoever asks.

   Every domain would carry its own user list and its own idea of a role, and a leaver would have to be removed from each of them separately, correctly, on the same day.

3. Definitions

   Why definitions are a layer

   Its behaviour. What form it is captured on, what stages it moves through, who acts at each one and what is produced along the way are read from definitions rather than compiled into the domain that happens to own the record.

   Changing an approval route would be a release in whichever application owned it, and the same rule would have to be re-implemented in each domain that needed it.

4. Shared services

   One of those services, in depth

   Its documents, its notifications, its tasks, and the reference data that gives its fields stable meaning. These are called, not implemented, by the domain the record is in.

   Six document stores, six notification systems, six task engines — and a document raised in one domain would be a copy somewhere else rather than the same document.

5. One record layer

   Continuity. When work crosses from one domain to another it is the same record being read, not a message describing it — which is why its history survives the crossing instead of being restated on the other side.

   Crossing a boundary would mean an export, an import, and a reconciliation — and the moment those disagree, somebody has to decide which system is right.

6. The outside edge

   The connection mechanisms

   Reach. Where the answer lives in a system that is staying where it is, the record can still use it — under the same organization and seat rules as everything above.

   Each domain would negotiate its own connection and hold its own credentials, and there would be no single place to see what continON is reaching or on whose authority.

The record is one object all the way down. It is not handed between the layers as a copy, which is the difference between a platform and a set of applications that agree to exchange files.