Progress and Breakdowns in Early Requirements Definition For Boundary-Spanning Information Systems

摘要

Early requirements definition is an increasingly complex process for systems that span organizational boundaries. Where there is no unequivocal rationale for change, multiple stakeholders from various knowledge domains must be involved in defining the scope of change and the high-level requirements for the supporting information system - in effect designing the system in terms of form and overall function. Stakeholders have only a partial understanding of the business process as a whole, and tend to provide very different definitions of what is the systems "problem" that they face. The IS analysis team must therefore deal with IS requirements as an emergent stream of information from which they learn, avoiding premature closure. This paper presents an exploratory study, that attempts to introduce breakdowns into the group requirements definition process, as a way to achieve emergent learning in early requirements definition for systems that span organizational boundaries.