A Multi-View Framework for Organizational Patterns

From the original work proposed by Gamma, design patterns have provided an important contribution to the development of well-structured software systems. This paper studies patterns supporting requirements analysis and, in particular, it discusses organizational patterns supporting the conceptual specification of business conversations among organizations within a virtual enterprise. These patterns are elicited from coordination and transaction costs economics theories and they are validated through a wide variety of non-trivial case studies. Organizational patterns are provided using three different concurrent views: an intentional view, a strategic view and a process view. Each view addresses a specific set of concerns of interest to different stakeholders in the system and, as a consequence, it has its own particular notation, rationale and constraints. Additionally, since these views are not fully independent, the paper discusses how elements of one view are connected to elements in other views.