Preliminary Literature Review of Policy Engineering Methods; Toward Responsibility Concept

This paper introduces a preliminary review of the research currently performed in the field of Policy. This review aims to understand the approaches covered by main research streams in that area and to highlight the advantages of the essential and most renowned solutions. The review of the literature quickly provides a plethora of publications that presents innovative proposals on the matter of policy conceptual model, engineering methods, elicitation languages, as well as cases studies. It also brings out that the papers most often refer rather evasively to the organizational model layers when aligning and positioning their theory with organizational concepts. Consequently, it sounds useful to orient and improve our own developments in the purpose of ameliorate that issue. Based on that overview´s results, we are able to orient our researches more deeply by proposing an innovative approach that focuses in one hand on a policy model designed to take into account the responsibility of stakeholders and in the other hand on policy engineering method that takes care of business process while at the same time using requirement engineering principles. Responsibility is a notion that remains rarely addressed and that however embodies important and well-know concepts like accountability, capability and commitment. Moreover, responsibility constitutes a fundamental notion of management theory and is consequently identified as a meaningful bridge toward organizational artifacts. Exploiting process to define policy seems likewise to offer new research opportunities since process organizations become a more widely spread structured approach.