Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
well-defined understanding of their own domain within the organisation before proper
alignment between them can be successfully achieved. It is often the case that the
poor understanding between the business and IT requirements can critically affect the
quality of the alignment [31]. Eliciting and representing the business requirements is
important for accurate mapping of IT capabilities to obtain the optimal alignment
between business service and IT capabilities [32]. Incomplete requirements were also
found to be the top reason for failures in the Information System (IS) projects,
whereas user involvement was found to have high influence on the IS project success
factor [33]. The notion of "completeness" in requirements definition is problematic as
there is no specific standard or easy procedure to determine the validity of the re-
quirements information that is important and required by the consultant provided by
the users (in our interest, the organisations) [34]. The missing requirements are found
to arise from intangible information within the informal (e.g. socio-cultural) factors in
the organisation that are difficult to elicit and represent [8],[35]. Incorporating the
cultural aspects in the informal requirements is therefore important to fill in gaps in
the requirements that forms the foundation for the business [36].
Techniques such as use case development, user centered design. structured inter-
views and informal modeling, which are among some of the widely practiced
approaches by the IT consultant (acting as requirement engineers) [37], are available
for eliciting requirements from stakeholders. However, very little attention is given to
documentations providing clear understanding and management of the requirements.
Well-recorded requirements ensure the identification of any incomplete requirements
and enable the realisation of potential reuse of the requirements [38]. One problem
identified in the requirement elicitation is the lack of ability to express and record the
stakeholders' requirements in an understandable form, for not only the consultants to
build the alignment, but also for the non-technical people in the organisation being
analysed [39].
3 Articulation of Complex Business and IT Alignment
Requirements
In an organisation context, business functions are performed within a social system,
where people behave in a coordinated manner that corresponds to certain specified
norms [40]. Organisational Semiotics (OS) [41],[8] provides a set of elaboration tech-
niques for stakeholder identification and analysis. Treating any technology change, e.g.
the introduction of a new IT system, as a course of action, the Stakeholder Identifica-
tion method aids the analysis by placing the change as the focus of the analysis, which
is surrounded by potential stakeholders. The roles, responsibilities and impact of the
stakeholders in relation to each course of action can be articulated in a structured man-
ner by careful application of semiotic based stakeholder theory. The application of OS
concepts in modeling organisations is supported through a set of tools called Method
for Eliciting, Analysing and Specifying Users' Requirements (MEASUR) [42], e.g.
problem articulation method (PAM) and norm analysis method (NAM).
PAM provides a set of mechanisms to identify the main issues related to the organi-
sation context, which enables an establishment of understanding of a complex problem
situation faced by the business. Valuation Framing serves as a feedback in PAM to
