Contemporary Challenges in Requirements Discovery and Validation: Two Case Studies in Complex Environments - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 48

an information sharing platform called Enforce 3 (pronounced “Enforce cubed”). It
was this platform that the County anchor partners engaged BSI to provide.
At a high level, the Enforce 3 platform was designed to support the collection and
normalization of incident and arrest data from multiple public safety agencies and
to provide a uniformWeb-based interface for browsing, search, analysis, and report-
ing by participating agencies. In addition, the platform created mechanisms for less
formal communication between information sharing partners, such as discussion
forums and chat. Other specific modules of the platform included GIS mapping of
data, systems alerts (i.e., watch lists and incident tickers), crime forecasting and
probability analysis, and free-form keyword search.
The BSI Project Team for IPSI was relatively small. The Project Manager held
the central role in coordinating the four partner entities as well as a handful of
other law enforcement agencies that were targeted for later adoption of the Enforce 3
platform . 4 Because of the relative importance of the IPSI project for the local and
regional reputation of the firm, the Project Manager was reinforced in his coordina-
tion and client support efforts by several of BSI's senior officers, including the Chief
Operations Officer (COO), Senior Vice President (SVP), and Chief Technology
Officer (CTO). The development unit for the initiative was a team of three to
four developers led by a Senior Developer. Finally, there was an implementation
team consisting of approximately three FTEs, who were responsible for all data
conversion planning, installation scheduling, and platform training.
RE Processes. The IPSI project reflected a range of requirements processes,
including those pursued by the anchor partners and vendor separately, as well their
joint activity after the inception of the project. The majority of the requirements
for the project were articulated prior to BSI's engagement in the partners' RFP
document. Within the RFP, system requirements were laid out in an “Integration
Platform Requirements” section. This section included the detailed requirements
covering the areas of integration platform requirements, IPSI system overview
requirements, technical IPSI system requirements, system implementation and sup-
port requirements, specific mandatory tasks and associated deliverables, and IPSI
system documentation overview requirements. The requirements outlined in the
RFP were almost entirely text-based, rendered in natural language. The 150-page
RFP document contained only five graphical models, including business process or
data flow diagrams for each of the four anchor partners and a simplified architectural
diagram for the proposed system.
Interestingly, the requirements detailed in the RFP were in turn drawn from mul-
tiple sources. As a primary input to the RFP document, the anchor partners identified
an RFP released two years earlier by a consortium of law enforcement agencies is
another county. The IPSI RFP was largely modeled on this earlier RFP document.
In addition, each of the anchor partners was tasked with documenting their internal
4 It was envisioned that information from all of the law enforcement agencies within the county
will eventually be integrated on the system.