Modeling organizations for information systems requirements engineering

Abstract

In attempting to understand information system environments during requirements engineering, it is often helpful to have an understanding of the 'whys' as well as the 'whats' about the environment. A natural way to answer why questions is by tracing them to goals. In an organizational environment, however, the whys do not originate from a single set of given goals. Organizational agents depend on each other for goals to be achieved, tasks to be performed, and resources to be furnished. A requirements model that captures knowledge about an organizational environment can be enriched by including the network of dependency relationships among agents. A set of intentional operators for modeling dependencies among agents is proposed, and a preliminary axiomatic characterization is presented.