Regulation Based Linking of Strategic Goals and Business Processes

To be able to make changes to a business process, it is necessary to understand how the process supports the strategic goals of the business and how changes to the goals may impact the process and vice versa. This paper explains the relations between strategic goals and business processes by adopting a regulation point of view. This point of view holds that the main property of business systems is their constancy. A business achieves constancy by regulating its relationships with other business entities. We model this constancy with maintenance goals which could be seen as a more precise definition of strategic goals. We then link these maintenance goals to achievement goals that correspond to operational goals. We further link these achievement goals with the business processes designed to achieve them

UML for Early Requirements Elicitation: A Regulation based Approach

Early requirements of information systems are often understood in terms of the elicitation of stakeholders high-level goals to be supported by the system under discussion. Stakeholders goals are considered as the ultimate explanation of requirements. It is assumed that the notion of a high-level goal is natural and that high-level goals need no explanation with regard to their origins. We believe that these assumptions result in the definition of inadequate goals. We propose an organizational model where regulation provides an explanation for high-level goals. We will show that the goals of an organization can be seen as originating from its need to maintain its stability with regard to multiple opportunities and threats it identifies in its environment. Understanding the origins of goals enables stakeholders to change and expand the set of high-level goals envisioned for the system under discussion. In this paper we show how this framework can be used with UML in order to construct models for early requirements

An Experiment Using Document Annotations in Education

This paper describes an on-going experiment at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne regarding the use of Web based document annotations for educational purposes. An annotation tool called Medium was built, merging database and Web technologies that will be used as a companoin for classical university courses and collaborative learning experiments

Experiential learning approach for requirements engineering education

The use of requirements engineering (RE) in industry is hampered by a poor understanding of its practices and their benefits. Teaching RE at the university level is therefore an important endeavor. Shortly before students become engineers and enter the workforce, this education could ideally be provided as an integrated part of developing the requisite business skills for understanding RE. Because much social wisdom is packed into RE methods, it is unrealistic to expect students with little organizational experience to understand and appreciate this body of knowledge; hence, the necessity of an experiential approach. The course described in this paper uses an active, affective, experiential pedagogy giving students the opportunity to experience a simulated work environment that demonstrates the social/design-problem complexities and richness of a development organization in the throes of creating a new product. Emotional and technical debriefing is conducted after each meaningful experience so that students and faculty, alike can better understand the professional relevancies of what they have just experienced. This includes an examination of the many forces encountered in industrial settings but not normally discussed in academic settings. The course uses a low-tech social simulation, rather than software simulation, so that students learn through interaction with real people, and are therefore confronted with the complexity of true social relationship

Enterprise modeling using the foundation concepts of the RM-ODP ISO/ITU standard

Enterprise architecture (EA) projects require analyzing and designing across the whole enterprise and its environment. Enterprise architects, therefore, frequently develop enterprise models that span from the markets in which the organization operates down to the implementation of the IT systems that support its operations. In this paper, we present SEAM for EA: a method for defining an enterprise model in which all the systems are systematically represented with the same modeling ontology. We base our modeling ontology on the foundation modeling concepts defined in Part 2 of ISO/ITU Standard "Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing” (RM-ODP). This work has two contributions to enterprise architecture: the SEAM for EA method itself and the use of Part 2 of the RM-ODP standard as a modeling ontolog

Goals, Interpretations, and Policies in Information Systems Design

Current goal-oriented requirements engineering methods focus on the definition of optimal requirements that an information system needs to support in order to help its stakeholders to achieve their goals. But, the lack of systemic reasoning and disregard for questions of interpretation lead to insufficient attention given to activities and implicit policies affecting the definition of these goals. This results in the optimization of the goals to the their activities, their policies requirements for potentially inadequate goals. Our framework relates stakeholders and their interpreted constraints and capabilities. It enables requirements engineers to better understand the rationale for goals found through requirements elicitation techniques and shows that conflicting goals can be reconciled by understanding how they fit in a higher-level activity. This results in the formulation of a more adequate set of goals that the information system should support in order for the organization and stakeholders to perform their activities

REGULATION, THE INVISIBLE PART OF THE GOAL ORIENTED REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING ICEBERG

Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) is considered to be one of the main achievements that the requirements of the Requirements Engineering field has produced since its inception. Several GORE methods were designed in the last twenty years in both research and industry. Curiously, GORE methods seem to have emerged out of nowhere in the early 1990s, the concept of Goal appearing as a natural element in explaining human and organizational behaviour. We have found no theoretical or philosophical work that explicitly link GORE to an underlying organizational model. In this paper, we show that most GORE methods are implicitly based on the goal-seeking, decision making organizational model. We argue that there are other organizational models that may better explain human behaviour, albeit at the expense of more complex models. We present one such alternative model that explains individual and organizational survival through continuous regulation. We give our point of view of the changes needed in GORE methods to support this alternative view through the use of maintenance goals and beliefs