From Rich User Requirements to System Requirements

In recent years the usage of information systems has changed dramatically. Today many information systems are developed for non-organizational users. These wide-area end-users are often socially, as well as geographically very widely dispersed, which makes it for organizations that develop information systems extremely difficult to know who their users are, or what they expect. Previous research has claimed that rich user requirements information is necessary, in order to understand how to serve this audience right. However, at the same time current requirements engineering methods, capable of providing this rich information, do not serve the needs of designers and developers, who actually implement the services and who need precise knowledge of system requirements. We found that there is a severe gap in the communication of requirements between end-user, analyst, and designer. We used the design science research agenda to develop a method for extending one advanced requirements engineering method, WARE, to provide support for the full spectrum of communication. Our study presents the results of an ongoing research program, studying the innovation possibilities of Mobile Presence technology. Our method enables analysts to make the transition from rich user requirements to system requirements, which designers and developers can use in their implementation work.