Value-based requirements engineering for value webs

Abstract

Since the 1980s, requirements engineering (RE) for information systems has been performed in practice using techniques (rather than the full method) from Information Engineering (IE) such as business goal analysis, function- and process modeling, and cluster analysis. Recently, these techniques have been supplemented with portfolio management, which looks at sets of IT projects and offers fast quantitative decision-making about continuation of IT projects. Today's networked world, though, poses challenges to these techniques. A major drawback is their inability to adequately specify the requirements for IT systems used by businesses that provide services to each other in a value web. In this paper, we analyze this problem, and propose a solution by coupling IE and portfolio management with value-based RE techniques at the business network level. We show how these techniques interrelate, and illustrate our approach with a small example. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.