In this paper we are interested in cooperative infor-mation systems (CIS) in inter-organizational environments. They are information systems on a large scale, which con-nect different organizations, often autonomous, sharing common goals, forming in this case inter-organizational system (IOS). In order to develop a CIS, we propose a Vp-CIs approach, which incorporates a notion of software en-gineering, which are the viewpoints from the needs analysis phase to describe their requirements and needs. This ap-proach defines a meta-model of viewpoint, which enable us to instantiate the viewpoints necessary to identify the needs and requirements of a CIS.