Objectives driven capture of business rules and of information systems requirements

Abstract

There is a natural and logical relationship between the high level objectives of a business and the requirements of an infonwlon system supporting the business and its activities. We outline a fiamework for informatlon systems requirements capture and specification, where the determination and explicit specification of business ObJectives play a vital role. The framework is described by a number of "meta-models", which guide the specification, structuring, and analysis of goals, problems, concepts, activities, processes, actors, and other descriptive components. The paper also describes how "business rules" have been incorporated in this approach. The nature of business rules is discussed, as well as sources from where the business rules are derived. The obJectives driven approach has been successfully used in a number of real-life proJects in information systems requirements engineering. I. INTRODUCITONThe importance of establishing explicit links between the development of business objectives and strategies and information system development, is recognised 16, 14, 15, 193.The growing importance of information systems for running the business, the high cost of developing new systems, and the lifetime of an information system of, normally, more than 10 years, indicates the need of both better undersranding the business, and deriving information system requirements from this understanding. A good information system can be a competitive asset of the business. while a system not conforming to the business needs can severely hinder the running of the business. This is why we now can observe the beginning of a paradigm shift from the more technology oriented Information Engineering and Object Oriented approaches to frameworks which focus on hodelling of "business rules" [12, 15,20,22].A large number of commercial system development methods and CASE tools exist today. However, these products address mainly the middle andor later stages of the systems development lifecycle. Practically none of them address, in a structured way, the early, business objectives analysis and requirements generating stages, and the problem of moving from the informal to the formal domain.Existing methods are not adequate for explicit capturing, and representing in a structured way, "business and organisational knowledge" to be subsequently used to drive the information system development phases. Links between business and enterprise models and information system specifications are not maintained, This makes it impossible to reason about changes required in the information system, as a consequence of changes of the enterprise.In this paper we present an approach to information system requirements acquisition, which is driven by the explicit representation and analysis of business objectives, concepts, activities, and rules. A distinguished feature of this approach is the method for developing, acquiring, and communicating early, enterprise knowledge and user requirements by a structured, iterative, working and modelling approach. The process ...

A methodology and tool support for managing business rules in organisations

“…[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]). Both, researchers and practitioners are convinced that since business rules are very sensitive to business changes they require explicit treatment during IS development to ensure the IS agility.…”

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