Requirements Engineering for Enterprise Systems: What We Know and What We Don’t Know? - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 114

provide cross-functional services to a business. They often impact data semantics
and business processes across more than one functional area of a business and
today, they increasingly perform cross-organizational services. This sub-area of RE
is becoming even more important as ES bring the vital capabilities for modern
companies to network with others in forming extended enterprises [ 59] .
The requirements for ES concern the business processes and the data flows that
the ES should support as well as the key information entities in the subject domain
of the system. These requirements reflect the needs of organizational units in one or
more companies for a system that helps solve coordination and collaboration prob-
lems related to processing, for example, a purchase order, a good receipt, a sales
order, or managing inventory levels. RE for ES is about composition and reconcili-
ation of conflicting demands [13] . The RE process usually starts with a general set
of business process and data requirements, then helps explore standard ES-package
functionality to see how closely it matches the ES adopting organization's process
and data needs [ 13] . This typically happens in an iterative fashion and includes
(1) in today's cross-organizational case, mapping each partner company's organi-
zational structure into the ES-package's predefined organization units; (2) defining
a scope for business process standardization using standard application modules;
(3) creating business process and data architectures specific to the extended enter-
prise based on predefined reusable package-specific process and data models;
(4) specifying data conversion, reporting, and interface requirements. Currently,
vendors of business software packages and their consulting partners provide stan-
dard RE processes for ES projects. In addition, a number of creative solutions were
proposed by researchers and practitioners to further reduce the cost of RE-for-
ES by avoiding scope creep, involving the right stakeholders, allocating sufficient
resources, adopting goal-directed project management practices, and enlisting the
vendors' and consultants' support to those problems [ 13, 28, 41] . Despite these
efforts, it is still very difficult to find a match between the flexibility often required
by the business and the rigidity usually imposed by the ES-package modules [14,
15]. In this chapter, we set out to identify the need for future research that addresses
this difficulty. Our goal is to make an inventory of the approaches discussed in the
RE literature, to evaluate the quality of evidence available regarding whether these
approaches actually worked, and to identify contemporary currents which shape the
future focus of RE research efforts.
The scope of this chapter is restricted to elicitation and modeling/documentation
techniques and the main unit of analysis is at the micro level, i.e. projects and orga-
nizations, rather a business sector or even a geographic zone (e.g. North America,
Europe, Asia). Some good studies that compare RE practices at macro level are
presented in [ 21, 30, 45] . This chapter will not address the matter of industrial take-
up of RE practices except in as much as this relates to parts of the RE for ES.
For a thorough example of analysis of RE practices, we refer interested readers to
[ 21, 30, 45] .
The chapter is organized as follows: We start with a description of the results
of a literature review of published research and experience reports in both journals
and research-oriented conferences. This is followed by an evaluation of research