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 out of the transformation may be ‘’negative” for some customers and “positive” 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 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 constrains outside the system boundary that are significant to the system