Towards an integrative modelling technique between business and information system development

Abstract

There are many situations during information system development (ISD) where there is a need to do modelling on a business level before more detailed and robust modelling are done on the technical system level. Most business level modelling uses some form of natural language constructs which are, on the one hand, easy to use by untrained users, but which are too vague and ambiguous to be used in subsequent systems level modelling by systems analysts, on the other hand. The goal of this study is to develop an integrative modelling technique that is easy enough to be used by most business users with little training, but robust and structured enough to be used in subsequent ISD modelling. The term “integrative” in the title refers to the fact that this technique attempts to bridge the current gap between modelling on a business level and modelling on a technical level. The research consists of two major phases. During the first phase, an integrative modelling technique is developed using a grounded approach. The data that is used for analysis is a representative example of the major ISD modelling techniques used currently. For instance, to represent all the UML techniques, the UML 2 standard is used. The purpose of this first phase is to understand what the fundamental concepts and relationships in ISD are and to develop an integrative technique based on that. During the second phase, the resultant artefact created by the first phase is evaluated and improved using the design science research approach. This artefact is used in a representative set of business modelling situations to evaluate its applicability and suitability as an integrative modelling technique between business and ISD. The integrative modelling technique is evaluated from three perspectives: how it represents business rules, how it handled various aspects of ISD and how it represents requirements expressed as use cases. These evaluations used the two main design criteria of ease of use for users and at the same time adequate levels of expressive power so that the model can be easily translated into existing ISD modelling languages. The integrative modelling technique developed identified the following three levels of modelling entities and their relationships: • Base entities (corresponding to the morphological level in linguistics) • Structure entities (corresponding to the syntactical level in linguistics) • Role entities (corresponding to the semantic level in linguistics) The contribution of this research is to provide a better understanding of the fundamental entities in business and ISD modelling and their relationships in order to improve informal, mostly textual, business modelling.