Organizational information requirements are the services of information systems required by organizations (Davis & Olson, 1985). Correct organizational information requirement specifications should reflect a deep-structure understanding of the organizational systems to be modeled (Wand & Weber, 1990). Due to the increasing complexity of organizational contexts and the human cognitive limits, information analysts need organizational domain knowledge support in comprehending organizational contexts and in determining correct information requirement specifications. Currently, there are basically two approaches to providing organizational domain knowledge. The first approach is providing organizational theories to guide information analysts in understanding organizational contexts (Bullen & Rockart, 1981; IBM, 1981; Kerner, 1979; Martin, 1990; Yadav, 1985). Organizational theories can help information analysts understand organizational contexts. However, the theories are too abstract for the purpose of deriving correct requirement specifications (Karimi, 1988; Lederer & Sethi, 1991). The second approach is providing well documented, tested, and validated specifications for reuse (Arango & Prieto-Diaz, 1991). However, without an understandable classification system relating reusable requirement specifications to organizational contexts, information analysts may have difficulties retrieving the correct requirement specifications for a specific organizational context. Both organizational theories and reusable requirement specifications provide only partial solutions for the problem of information requirement analysis. To bridge the gap, we propose a classification system for reusable requirement specifications, called organizational information requirement topology. The topology can link organizational theories and reusable requirement specifications together to help information analysts understand organization contexts and reuse correct requirement specifications. After a brief review of the related research in the next section, we will discuss the development of the organizational information requirement topology in the following sections.
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