The development of reference models for the RENISYS specification method

New trends in globalization encourage firms to consider new forms of organizational structures and supporting information system infrastructure. Information systems for these emerging global business networks are hard to specify because of their complexity and changeability. A problem with current specification methods is that they are not sufficiently capable of capturing the context of the information system. To address this problem, we examine the role that reference models can play in increasing the context-sensitivity of such methods. We present the reference framework from the RENISYS approach to help in the specification of a more adequate information system infrastructure for business networks. Within this framework we distinguish between three modeling levels: the problem domain, human network, and information system level. To further refine the problem domain we apply the roles-linkage model from the area of network analysis. This model is used to represent the actors and links between those actors as the basis for the exact definition of the communication patterns between the participants of the network. A small case study shows how such a context-sensitive specification method could be implemented