CATWOE

CATWOE is a mnemonic developed and proposed by Checkland and Smyth (1976) to help ensure that a Draft Root Definition in the context of a Soft Systems Methodology application is acceptable.

C	The Customer	The individual(s) who receive the output from the transformation. In recent times, it has been recognised that the output of the transformation may be ‘’negative” for some customers and “positive” for others. This has led to a refinement of CATWOE to BATWOVE, where the C is broken into Beneficiaries and Victims!
A	The Actors	Those individuals who would DO the activities of the transformation if the system were made real.
T	The Transformation	The purposeful activity is expressed as a transformation of Input to Output.
W	Weltanschauung	It's a German word that literally means “world view”. It is the belief that makes sense of the root definition.
O	Owner	The wider system decision maker who is concerned with the performance of the system.
E	Environmental Constraints	The key constraints outside the system boundary that are significant to the system.

References

• Burge, S. (2015). An overview of the soft systems methodology. System Thinking: Approaches and Methodologies, 1-14.
• Smyth, D. S., & Checkland, P. B. (1976). Using a systems approach: the structure of root definitions. Journal of applied systems analysis, 5(1), 75-83.