Context. Business strategy and intentional factors that drive the information systems development and evolution have been addressed by several conceptual modelling initiatives, mostly from goal modelling and enterprise architecture domains. As agility scales to top executive levels, business strategy becomes adaptive, frequently and objectively assessed, while shapes the structure of the organisation around business capabilities. Problem. On the one hand, modelling several business layer views with EA frameworks to represent business strategy could be a challenging efort under a constantly changing environment. On the other hand, using more lightweight but flexible goal modelling frameworks could hinder the aim of getting well-bounded and repeatable business strategy models. Objective. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of connecting well-defined business strategy models using i* and, by exploiting existing modelling methods and transformation techniques, connect them with business process and information system models, to finally generate the working code of the software product. Contribution. We present an initial approach of a modelling procedure to capture business strategy using i* under an adaptive, agile approach, and show a practical integration with a software production method from requirements to code.
Model-Driven Development (MDD) aims for the automatic generation of working code from
the conceptual schema of the information system (IS). The OO-Method (OOM) [
Even though the implementation of MDD allows to improve the software development process,
new technological challenges afect technology-intensive organisations in times of constant
change and high uncertainty. These new technological challenges regard an agile strategic,
operative, and technological reaction of the organisations to changes in its environment. In
the last decades, conceptual modelling initiatives aiming to align strategy and technology have
emerged and have been materialized in Enterprise Architecture (EA) modelling frameworks (i.e.,
Archimate [
To achieve strategic alignment in MDD in a lightweight manner, thus, without performing a
big upfront organizational modelling, we propose a case-based approach, where an external
influence afecting the organization is modelled with i*, following a well-defined modelling
procedure. The procedure is inspired by agile organization’s approach to business strategy [
Since MDD approaches are criticized for being too rigid to generate usable information
systems, we aim for a more stable ground: the digitalized business domain. In the last two
decades, novel software design and architecture approaches have focused on isolating a
stable software layer the domain model and the business services, setting them apart from the
constantly-changing front-end applications. These approaches have been widely adopted by
practitioners [
The proposal, named S2C (from Strategy-to-Code), integrates business strategy modelling,
business process modelling, and information system modelling, into a single software production
method. It is based on existing modelling frameworks with sound theoretical foundations [
We apply i* to model business strategy and organisational structure, following four steps: • Step 1 - Model external events: We propose to model external events that afect the organisation as social dependencies. In the example shown in Figure 2, a specific customer segment requires that the organisation a Real Estate Agency, provides an online renting service, to avoid the physical signature of documents. • Step 2 - Model strategy: we propose to use goals, tasks, and means to ends refinements to specify 1) the high-level goal of the organisation under the new requirement, 2) high-level strategic actions to achieve the goal, 3) more specific actions for implementing the strategy. For this more specific level, the organization depends on the organizational units that have the capabilities to perform these actions. The organizational units are modelled as agents. In the example, the main goal is to increase the abroad customers market share, the high-level strategy is to ofer the online renting service, and specific actions are to develop a virtual showroom, and allow booking and payment for the online renting process, assigned to the Rentals Teams, and to provide legal support for online contracts, assigned to the Legal Department. • Step 3 - Model roles and responsibility: we use i* roles to model specific responsibilities for implementing the strategy, and assign specific and measurable goals for allowing to follow up the performance of the strategy. In the example, the Agents are responsible for attaining 10 bookings from abroad customers per week, while Head of Legal Department must comply with having less than 1% of rents with legal problems. • Step 4 - Model Organisational Reaction: we use goal dependencies to model the reaction of the organisation toward its customers with a new service. For simplicity, we just model ”show available properties” and ”booking” services and connect them with the Tenants.
We propose to automatically trace and transform the organizational concepts into business
process concepts, context, and documentation. To achieve this, we follow the approach of
the GoBIS transformation technique [
The business process is modelled through A) communicative event diagrams, which represents the flow of communicative interactions among actors, B) specifications of communicative events, where the requirements are documented in terms of structured text, and C) message structures which allows specifying the content and structure of the messages among actors. Figure 3.(A) presents a Communicative Event Diagram, Figure 3.(B) shows an extract of a communicative event specification, as well as the message structure. As GoBIs proposes, the communicative events BOOK01 and BOOK03 have been directly mapped from the dependencies between the agent and the tenant in the business strategy model shown in Figure 2.
Following the guidelines proposed in [
The proposed modelling procedure exploits i*’s approach to considering social actors and
strategic elements in the same model, in order to benefit both business strategy analysis and
mode-driven development. Regarding business strategy analysis, it is possible to assess whether
the organization could have an agile reaction to external events, by checking how many
organizational units are afected to deploy the strategy. Considering the working example, as shown in
Figure 2 Legal Department and Rentals Team have responsibilities, which implies coordination
between them. In a more complex real-world case, the organization could need to afect many
organizational units and/or trigger several influences among them, which might indicate a
lack of cohesion and/or a high coupling of the organizational capabilities, thus, providing
hints on the need for a organization structure refactoring. To do this, using i*’s relationship
participates-in to model organizational structure is of utter importance, however, designing
an understandable diagram including both the graphical representations of participates-in and
dependency relationships in the same layout could be challenging. A drawback of i* in strategy
modelling is that some environmental events that cannot be modelled as social dependencies,
such as competitors’ actions, for instance, while using the same constructs to model diferent
levels of abstraction could be confusing when sharing the model with stakeholders which are
unfamiliar with i*. Using an extended version of i*, including influence constructs such as those
proposed in [
With respect to the advantages of i* and the proposal for model-driven software development, we think that, besides the GoBIS transformations, the strategic elements in i* models could set a context for the modular design of business processes, by considering the second and more specific level of strategic actions modelled in i* can provide the context for a [ ? ], and the specific, measurable goals which relate to the implementation of these actions can be mapped into business process elements that report the performance of the process. For example, in Figure 2 the action legal support for online contract sets the context for a new business process module that details the interaction among actors needed to fulfil the legal requirements for each new online contract, and the associated goal less than 1% of rents with legal problems can be mapped into a communicative event in this business process model, where the Head of Legal reports the accomplishment of the objective. The traceability can be documented by tracing the objective to the goal in the communicative event specification (Figure 3.B).
The S2C method approach presents a new perspective on the strategic alignment of technology
through conceptual modelling. By integrating business strategy, business process, and
information system models, we aim for the generation of strategically aligned software systems. i*’s
unique approach for representing social actors and strategic elements serves as the starting
point for a lightweight business strategy modelling approach, although challenges regarding the
lack of influence constructs and graphical representation of the organization structure must be
addressed. Future work will address these challenges as well as the articulation of the method
parts using a Situational Method Engineering [
This work has been developed with the support of the Spanish State Research Agency and the Generalitat Valenciana under the projects TIN2016-80811-P and PROMETEO/2018/176, and co-financed with ERDF and the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID)/ Scholarship Program/ Doctorado Becas Chile/ 2020-72210494.