Requirements Engineering for Enterprise Systems: What We Know and What We Don’t Know? - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 130

streamline the collaborative execution of the knowledge-intensive activities in
RE-for-ES within and beyond the ES-adopter's organizational boundaries, which
can be invaluable in identifying the ways to improve the fit between enterprise
requirements and ES functionality. We make the note that despite the collabora-
tive nature of RE-for-ES, the forms of collaborations between the ES-adopters
and consultants as well as among ERP-adopters themselves, has received in
the RE literature only scant attention. Understanding the forms of collaborative
RE-for-ES and the case-based reasoning models that serve best in the alignment
of a package to enterprise requirements is a worthy line of research for the future.
3. The trend to use agile RE approaches. These have been gaining momentum
among RE methodologies and are now entering the realm of ES implementa-
tion. More often than before, prominent agile publication venues (e.g. AGILE
and XP), report on companies' experiences of introducing agile approaches to
ES projects. (We searched the proceedings of these two conferences and found
more than 10 papers on agile approaches in ES implementations at large compa-
nies). While one might think that the agile philosophy is incompatible with the
ES project contexts, these companies experienced agile approaches as a viable
option. We do not think that this is surprising, because the agile philosophy's
focus on delivering business value and on satisfying clients is appealing to both
ES-adopters and consultants who, especially in times of economic downturn,
are pressed to demonstrate some specific instances of value of the ES-solution
much earlier in the project. Second, at the heart of any agile approach is an
assumption that regardless what the requirements might be at the project start,
they will not be the same at the project end. It is intuitive to think, there-
fore, that the longer the project, the more realistic this assumption would be.
In most situations, this assumption is realistic in the ES project contexts, noto-
rious for their highly volatile requirements and prolonged duration. We think
that the presence of agile approaches has certain implications for ES RE pro-
fessionals and that it is a potential topic of future research to uncover what
these implications are and how we can make a better use of the agile philos-
ophy in RE for ES. In our view, the investigation of these implications is a
mandate of the RE community and we should not leave this to the manage-
ment science community or to the agile community and wait for them to come
up with ideas for improving the existing RE-for-ES practices by using agile
principles.
4. The trend to deploy on-demand ES solutions. The terms Software as a Service
(SaaS) or on-demand ES refers to ES functionality being delivered over the
Internet from a single application instance that is shared across all users.
SaaS ES-solutions are rapidly increasing their share in some ES markets,
notably CRM, and also penetrate into various business areas (e.g. financial
accounting, human resource management). In uncertain economic conditions,
particularly to cost-conscious small and mid-sized businesses, this type of ES
solutions yields a number of cost benefits, including no up-front costs, no
licensing fees and rapid, easy deployment. More and more companies are mov-
ing their mission-critical systems to the SaaS model to realize these benefits.