Requirements Engineering for Enterprise Systems: What We Know and What We Don’t Know? - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 126

Furthermore, today's ES packages no longer compete on business functionality
but on quality attributes, that is on how well they meet the quality requirements (or
non-functional requirements) of the ES adopters. Finding an ideal match between
system configuration options and business processes would not be worth, unless it
meets certain performance, availability, security, interoperability requirements (just
to name a few). In the literature, we observe a number of publications [ 8, 9, 49] that
acknowledge both the importance of quality requirements and the need to develop
systematic approaches to address them in ES projects. However, how to trade-off
these requirements, what represents the “right balance” among them, and when it is
realistic to achieve the right balance (in intra-company and in cross-organizational
settings) is largely unknown. Understanding the challenges this question poses
and proposing approaches to counter these challenges represents a viable line for
future research. Specifically, we mean understanding the contextual mechanisms
that impact the process of joint RE and architecture design in ES projects.
The following two directions are closely connected and motivated by the
increased use of ES as cross-organizational coordination support technology and
the increased needs of ES adopters to design and redesign ES-supported coordi-
nation and collaboration processes within extended enterprises. The first direction
refers to making the cross-organizational coordination requirements an explicit part
of the requirements elicitation and modeling in ES projects. More in detail, our
motivation of the importance of this topic for the future RE research is presented
in [ 14] . In this review we found that with very few exceptions, the elicitation and
modeling approaches subsume the coordination requirements into process and data
requirements. An overall observation is that all the publications on techniques pre-
sented in Table 1 offer very little and fragmentary discussion on coordination, and
when they add it, it refers to intra-organizational and not to cross-organizational
coordination. We think that while in intra-organizational settings, this might not
represent an acute RE problem, in cross-organizational context if we keep using
the existing elicitation and modeling techniques as they are, it is likely to be sub-
optimal because they are not geared to this context. We therefore think that these
techniques should be extended (or even completely re-stated) to explicitly handle
cross-organizational coordination requirements [ 14] . The second and related direc-
tion for future research is about getting actively involved in empirical evaluation
of the existing techniques in cross-organizational contexts. Based on our recent
research on cross-organizational ES, we identified seven characteristics of these
projects which have implications for ES RE:
1. The projects deliver a shared system which lets the business activities of one
company become an integral part of the business of its partners.
2. The projects create system capabilities far beyond the sum of the ES compo-
nents' individual capabilities, which, allows the resulting system to qualitatively
acquire new properties as result of its configuration.
3. The solution-to-be may well include diverse configurations, each of which
matches the needs of a unique stakeholder group, which, in turn, implies the
presence of coordination mechanisms unique to each configuration.