Information systems development through social structures

Abstract

Information systems for organizations such as e-business and knowledge management systems must continually evolve to adapt to their operational environment. Unfortunately, current development methodologies do not support system evolution well, making software an obstacle to organizational changes. The paper describes a framework that develops and evolves seamlessly a system-to-be within its organizational environment. We adopt a set of social structures --- organizational styles and social patterns --- based on concepts of organization theory and agent approaches, as a foundation to model early and late requirements as well as architectural and detailed design. We illustrate the use of the social structures through a case study, and we specify one of the styles in Formal Tropos language. This research has been conducted within the context of the Tropos project.