Enterprise Modelling and the Teleological Approach

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 organisation in which the system will operate. This approach suggests further understanding and modelling of the organisational 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 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 organisational objectives, social roles and operations and the synthesis of these different perspectives towards a set of information systems requirements.