Building strategic enterprise context models with i*: a pattern-based approach

Abstract

Modern enterprise engineering (EE) requires deep understanding of organizations and their interaction with their context. Because of this, in early phases of the EE process, enterprise context models are often built and used to reason about organizational needs with respects to actors in their context and vice versa. However, far from simple, this task is usually cumbersome because of knowledge and communication gaps among technical personnel performing EE activities and their administrative counterparts. In this paper, we propose the use of strategic patterns expressed with the i* language aimed to help bridging this gap. Patterns emerged from several industrial applications of our DHARMA method, and synthesize knowledge about common enterprise strategies, e.g. CRM. Patterns have been constructed based on the well-known Porter’s model of the 5 market forces and built upon i* strategic dependency models. In this way technical and administrative knowledge and skills are synthesized in a commonly agreeable framework. The use of patterns is illustrated with an industrial example in the telecom field.