Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
pose entirely new challenges to RE for ES. We make the note that our list below
may seem eclectic, reflecting our perception of particularly acute needs.
1. The increased penetration of free and open source ES (FOS-ES) solutions.
Recent market research reports that ES adopters have become more receptive
to FOS-ES [ 47] . A major reason for this trend is that FOS-ES means reducing
licensing costs. In a recession-hit economy, FOS-ES solutions have become a
feasible strategy for many small to midsize companies that want to automate
their cooperation and coordination process. The technology of service-oriented
architecture (SOA) made it possible for these cost-conscious ES-adopters to effi-
ciently embed a FOS-ES-based solution within their processes and application
landscapes, and also to customize or improve their systems on ongoing basis
[ 51] . A recent review of the most popular FOS-ERP products is presented in [ 50] .
This trend introduces some changes that have RE implications [ 6, 7, 20] . For
example, the distance between the user and the developer gets smaller, because
the role of the ES adopter is changing from a consumer to a prosumer; this is
an active role in which the adopter assumes the process of adapting software,
reporting bugs, submitting feature requests, and posting messages to FOS-ES
community lists. Based on their willingness to share information, smart pro-
sumers will also provide bug fixes, new features and even entire modules. In this
setting, it is expected [ 20] that the smaller distance between the user and the
developer will alleviate the problem of misfit between the FOS-ES functionality
to the enterprise requirements. This, however, has not been investigated yet by
means of rigorous empirical research methods and we think it is a candidate line
of research for the future.
Moreover, becoming prosumers means to ES adopters a shift from a client
viewpoint to a developers' viewpoint, which also means adopting a new mindset
and accepting low level of managerial control, as the FOS-ES development is
a community-centric activity. Hence, the adopter will have to follow a RE cycle
that is influenced by many members of the community, which may incur massive
coordination costs. How to create a cost-effective RE process for ES adopters and
what coordination-enhancing activities should it include is an open question and
warrants future research.
2. The trend to form vendor-supported community collaborations for ES implemen-
tation. In order to lower the ES implementation cost and shorten the ES project
duration for their clients, ES vendors built online communities [ 47, 60] where
ES-adopters can share their knowledge of aligning the respective vendor's pack-
age to enterprise requirements For example, two of the major ERP vendors, SAP
and Oracle, have built, respectively, the SAP Developer Network and the Oracle
Technology Network. The sharing platforms typically are Web 2.0 knowledge
repository systems, which facilitate the members of the community to prac-
tice RE processes that actively involve case-based reasoning (e.g. exploring past
cases, short-listing similar cases and reusing the solutions from the past cases to
the particular context in question). Research [ 60] indicates that these repositories
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