Objectives driven capture of business rules and of information systems requirements

There is a natural and logical relationship between the high level objectives of a business and the requirements of an information system supporting the business and its activities. We outline a framework for information systems requirements capture and specification, where the determination and explicit specification of business objectives play a vital role. The framework is described by a number of “meta-models”, which guide the specification, structuring, and analysis of goals, problems, concepts, activities, processes, actors, and other descriptive components. The paper also describes how “business rules” have been incorporated in this approach. The nature of business rules is discussed, as well as sources from where the business rules are derived. The objectives driven approach has been successfully used in a number of real-life projects in information systems requirements engineering