Evangelia Kavakli

Enterprise Modelling and the Teleological Approach to Requirements Engineering

A critical factor in successful requirements analysis appears to be the understanding not only of what the system under consideration should do, but also why. To capture the purpose of an information system, one needs a mechanism to describe the behaviour of the organization in which the system will operate. This approach suggests further understanding 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 enter prise world and the system world. 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 paper describes an approach which involves the explicit modelling of organizational objectives, social roles and operations and the synthesis of these different perspectives towards a set of information systems requirements.

Goal-Driven Business Process Analysis - Application in Electricity Deregulation

Current business challenges such as deregulation, mergers, globalisation and increased competition have given rise to a new process-centric philosophy of business management. The key issue in this paradigm is the concept of business process. From a methodological perspective, this movement has resulted in a considerable number of approaches that encourage the modelling of business processes as a key component of any improvement or re-engineering endeavour. However, there is a considerable controversy amongst all these competing approaches about the most appropriate way for identifying the types and number of relevant processes. Existing business process modelling approaches describe an enterprise in terms of activities and tasks without offering sufficient guidance towards a process-centred description of the organisation.

Using scenarios to systematically support goal-directed elaboration for information system requirements

Recent requirements engineering research, recognises that successful system development relies upon the ability to model and understand the intentional structure of the organisational and business environment within which an IS is intended to operate. The importance of establishing and maintaining explicit links between information systems requirements and business goals is further emphasised by recent research in the areas of business re-engineering, systems evolution and change management. The paper presents our approach for deriving and supporting decisions about system requirements based on the teleological paradigm. In this approach requirements for a new system are seen as the fulfilment or operationalisation of organisational and business goals. In contrast to conventional goal-oriented approaches in which requirements are derived by high level goals by a (mostly) top-down goal decomposition process, we perceive goal operationalisation as the iterative process of experimenting-in-action, using scenario generation techniques to refine enterprise goals to a level at which they have an operational definition.

Capability-oriented Analysis and Design for Collaborative Systems: An example from the Doha 2022 World Cup Games

This paper presents a capability-oriented approach that facilitates strategic decisions for dealing with emergent behaviour and dynamics of artefacts and their evolutionary trajectory, where these artefacts are often a blending of physical and cyber actors working synergistically for achieving enterprise goals. We demonstrate this approach using an example from an application involving decision making for supporting venue operations for the Doha 2022 World Cup Games. The example focuses on the operations surrounding the strategy for security measures for entrance of spectators to a venue. For this specific example one needs to identify the capabilities required in order to establish a level of service acceptable to spectators within the resource constraints to be offered by the organising committee.