Co-Constructing IS Evolutions with Initiatives

The main challenge for an enterprise Information System (IS) is to be able to evolve in a sustainable way, that is, to be capable to adapt itself to the new environment, to dynamically integrate the ever-changing conditions of this environment, and to be sustainably coherent with the evolving challenges. Another important challenge for an IS is to support the enterprise activities, particularly its transversal businesses and processes and especially the activities that create value for the enterprise. In this context, we consider the idea that initiatives could play a prominent role in the IS evolution process, and that they could be considered as an opportunity for an IS to sustainably evolve, to support the enterprise transversal and value-creating activities and to be part of the IS steering methods. In this paper, we define the notion of initiative and we propose an approach for the collaborative engineering of initiatives based on an interoperability frame of reference.