ENTERPRISE MODELING AND THE TELEOLOGICAL APPROACH TO REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING

A critical factor in successful requirements analysis appears to be th e understanding not only of what the system under consideration should do, but also why. To capture the purpose of an information system, on e needs a mechanism to describe the behaviour of the organization in w hich the system will operate. This approach suggests further understan ding and modelling of the organizational goals and the way that these goals become operationalised. In software systems development we often make the distinction between the enterprise world and the system, wor ld. The former describes the domain about which the proposed software system is to provide some service, while the second is concerned with specifications on what the system does and include descriptions of the systems requirements, conceptual designs and implementations. This pa per describes an approach which involves the explicit modelling of org anizational objectives, social roles and operations and the synthesis of these different perspectives towards a set of information systems r equirements.