Technology Representation in i* Modules

In current business practice an integrated approach to represent at the design level the technological infrastructure that gives support to business processes is needed. We argue that it is highly complex considering technology in terms of specific functionalities from the beginning because these functionalities depend on new business requirements produced continually by internal and external changes. However, business-technology integration has been largely neglected in the modeling of business processes, including i* models, considering the technological components as highly abstract entities that do not require further description. In this paper, an overview of our approach to deal with technology representation in i* business process models is presented, which focuses on the identification of quality attributes that are offered by specific technologies and the representation of these technologies using a particular class of i* module. This approach has been explored in a previous work developing an example of a library in which an automatic identification technology is required to support some specific business processes.