Requirements Engineering for Enterprise Systems: What We Know and What We Don’t Know? - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 115

progress in (i) requirements elicitation, (ii) modeling, and (iii) the impact of a few
notable current trends on these two major RE sub-areas. We, then, lay out a set
of further research directions that we inferred from our reflection on good recent
progress, from examining past failures and from our knowledge about new business
developments in the ES marketplace.

2 Identifying Areas of RE Publication Activity

In the RE community, there is a consensus that the main problem in RE for ES is the
misfit between business requirements of ES adopters and ES functionality [ 14, 15,
20, 23] . Both RE researchers and practitioners agree that there is a gap between the
functionality required by an organization and functionality offered by the various
packages in the ERP marketplace. In the past decade, the RE community came up
with a significant number of ideas meant to solve a broad variety of RE issues related
to this gap. One reason for this growth in proposals is that an increasingly large num-
ber of companies have adopted packaged solutions and many of the adopters started
reflecting and reporting on their implementation experiences, including their RE
practices. Case studies and experience reports about ES implementations are now
being published by companies in virtually any industry sector. In addition, there is
much greater awareness of the importance of good RE practices and their adoption.
To illustrate the increase of RE publication on ES, we did a quick search of
literature sources in a few prominent bibliographic databases (IEEE Explore, ACM
Digital Library, Springerlink), which yielded Fig. 1.

250

201

200

175

169

143

150

123

110

96

100

78

49

50

36

25

11

8

5

0

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

Fig. 1 Number of publications in three bibliographic databases in the last 15 years