Modeling organizations for information systems requirements engineering

In attempting to understand information system environments during requirements engineering, it is often helpful to have an understanding of the `whys´ as well as the `whats´ about the environment. A natural way to answer why questions is by tracing them to goals. In an organizational environment, however, the whys do not originate from a single set of given goals. Organizational agents depend on each other for goals to be achieved, tasks to be performed, and resources to be furnished. A requirements model that captures knowledge about an organizational environment can be enriched by including the network of dependency relationships among agents. A set of intentional operators for modeling dependencies among agents is proposed, and a preliminary axiomatic characterization is presented