Goals, Interpretations, and Policies in Information Systems Design

Current goal-oriented requirements engineering methods focus on the definition of optimal requirements that an information system needs to support in order to help its stakeholders to achieve their goals. But, the lack of systemic reasoning and disregard for questions of interpretation lead to insufficient attention given to activities and implicit policies affecting the definition of these goals. This results in the optimization of the goals to the their activities, their policies requirements for potentially inadequate goals. Our framework relates stakeholders and their interpreted constraints and capabilities. It enables requirements engineers to better understand the rationale for goals found through requirements elicitation techniques and shows that conflicting goals can be reconciled by understanding how they fit in a higher-level activity. This results in the formulation of a more adequate set of goals that the information system should support in order for the organization and stakeholders to perform their activities.