An Agent-Oriented Enterprise Model for Early Requirements Engineering

This chapter introduces an agent-oriented enterprise model for conducting enterprise modeling during the early stages of information system requirements engineering. The enterprise model integrates a set of concepts and relationships that the analyst instantiates when building a model of the part of the organization in which the future information system will operate. The aim is to allow the analyst to produce an enterprise model which captures knowledge about an organization and its business processes, and which can be used to build an agent-oriented requirements specification of the future system and of its organizational environment. Compared to similar models, the present one integrates concepts and relationships allowing the analyst to capture the relevant intrinsic characteristics, such as autonomy and intentionality of human and software agents that are to participate in the future system. INTRODUCTION Business analysts and IT managers increasingly recognize that the ability to correctly and often extensively specify and analyze early requirements about an Information System (IS) is critical for gaining organizational acceptance of the future system and achieving a close match between the expected and observed quality thereof. Within the Requirements Engineering (RE) effort which initiates and subsequently guides the development and deployment of any IS within an organization, early RE is its first step, focusing on the representation and analysis of the organizational environment before the future system is introduced, dealing with the definition of desired behaviors and qualities of the future system that would fit this environment, and finally anticipating the effects that its introduction is likely to have on the performance of the organization. In order to analyze such organizational environments, it is necessary to understand the objectives, organizational processes, roles and interdependencies of different stakeholders. Although errors and misunderstandings at this level of requirements are frequent and costly, early RE is usually done informally. In this chapter, we propose to address this issue by suggesting a precisely and formally defined enterprise model to facilitate the modeling and analysis of early requirements for IS. This enterprise model allows the representation of the structures, organizational processes, resources, actors, work roles, behaviors, goals and constraints of the organizational setting in which the future IS will function. It can be both descriptive and definitional, i.e., spanning what is and what should be. One of its key characteristics is its support for the agent software engineering paradigm which allows developers to handle the life cycle of complex, distributed and open systems required to offer open and dynamic capabilities in the latest generation of enterprise IS (see, e.g., Castro et al., 2002). By instantiating the concepts and relationships provided in the enterprise model, the analyst can: analyze the current organizational structure and business processes in order to reveal problems and opportunities; evaluate and compare alternative organizational processes and structures; achieve common understanding and agreement between stakeholders (e.g., managers, owners, workers, etc.) about different aspects of the organization; build a database along the structure of the enterprise model for use in collecting, managing, and reusing the knowledge available in the organization. The proposed enterprise model draws on research in RE frameworks (e.g., Yu 1994; Dardenne et al., 1993), management theory found to be relevant for enterprise modeling (e.g., Simon 1976; Johnson & Scholes, 2002; Brickley et al., 2001; Uschold et al., 1997) and agent