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Intentional Alignment and Interoperability
in Inter-Organization Information Systems
Naveen Prakash
Abstract With the emergence of mergers, acquisitions, and collaborative
enterprises, the issues of alignment and interoperability in inter-organization infor-
mation systems have become more complex than before. We propose a two level
development approach driven by the intentional level and going to the process model
level. Alignment and interoperability requirements are first decided at the intentional
level. That is, (a) the intention of the inter-organizational system To Be is properly
aligned with intentions of the individual systems that come together, and (b) the
intentions of the individual systems must interoperate. Thereafter, at the process
model level, process model of the system To Be needs to be properly aligned to its
intention and the process models of the participating organizational systems interop-
erate. We develop a Two-dimensional framework to represent this. This framework
drives a development method to support inter-organizational system development.
We illustrate this method in a supply chain system example.
1 Introduction
Professor Colette Rolland has worked rather extensively on applying the notion of
intention to information systems. This is reflected in her work on process mod-
eling where she proposed the notion of a map [ 28] as a graph having intentions
as nodes and strategies as edges. She also proposed an intentional basis [ 26] for
product lines and families. In requirements engineering, she proposed goal-scenario
coupling [ 27] and developed guidelines for requirements elicitation. In the tool,
L'Ecritoire, there was an explicit notion of intention in the natural language inter-
face. Seeing the widespread application of the notion of intention, we propose here
to look at alignment and interoperability from the intentional perspective.
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