Linking Business Modelling to Socio-technical System Design

Few methods address analysis of socio-technical system requirements. This paper describes a method for analysing dependencies between computer systems and users/stakeholders in the operational environment. Domain scenarios describing the system and its context are used to create an environment model based on the i* notation. A method is proposed to define business organisational relationships, according to the coupling between agents determined by types of event flows between them, and secondly, by operationalising transaction cost theory to obtain an a priori view of relationships according to the market context for a client and supplier. Coupling metrics are applied to assess the degree of dependencies between the system and the users. High-level requirements are suggested to deal with different types of organisational design. The method is illustrated with a case study of a service engineer support system.