Contemporary Challenges in Requirements Discovery and Validation: Two Case Studies in Complex Environments - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 49

business processes to establish integration and interface requirements. Finally, the
RFP incorporated federal-level requirements for information sharing among law
enforcement entities.
The anchor partners weren't the only parties coming to the table with estab-
lished requirements. Since Enforce 3 was an existing platform offered by BSI, the
system itself embodied a broad range of functional and technical requirements.
The Enforce 3 system was initially designed as an add-on to the firm's Shield plat-
form (i.e., CAD/RMS). Thus, the design of the system was largely driven by
informal statements of need from BSI's existing clients. BSI clients discussed
the desire for greater exchange of information with other municipalities in their
local area, and Enforce 3 evolved as the BSI developers “toyed around” with ways
to expand their platform to address these needs. It was only after the system
had been implemented as a pilot module with a number of their clients that the
senior management of BSI recognized the value proposition of the Enforce 3 dis-
tinct from its integration with the Shield offering. As a fully developed, independent
module, Enforce 3 met an array of technical requirements set by acquiring clients.
These included network specifications, data submission requirements, and training
expectations.
In addition to the operational objectives of the BSI clients, the Enforce 3 system
drew significant functional requirements from standards developed at the federal
level. Specifically, Enforce 3 was designed to be in compliance with the Global
Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM), a standard developed by the U.S. Department
of Justice to act as a de facto data reference model for information exchange within
the nation's public safety communities.
Not all requirements were established prior to the initiation of the project. Several
requirements had to be identified and clarified through the interaction of the anchor
partners and the vendor. Specifically, these novel requirements centered on the areas
of service level agreements (incorporating a range of non-functional requirements),
forms definition requirements, and security policy requirements. The most intensive
of these collaborative requirements-setting tasks was the determination of unified
forms requirements. Because the four anchor partners were expected to employ
Enforce 3 for uniform reporting and exchange, the project team had to design data
entry and reporting artifacts that satisfied the needs of all partners. Furthermore,
additional law enforcement agencies from across the county had been engaged for
this effort, because of their anticipated migration to the platform over the subse-
quent one to three years. To achieve the unified form designs, the BSI team pursued
a two-pronged strategy: (1) collecting arrest and incident report forms from all law
enforcement agencies within the county and completing a gap analysis to deter-
mine unique fields or classification differences, and (2) convening focus group
sessions with user representatives to clarify reporting needs (e.g., determination
actual usage of data fields and perceived criticality). In documenting the specifi-
cations for unified forms, the BSI team had foregone formal modeling techniques in
favor of comparative checklists and iterative prototyping of data entry and reporting
forms.