Towards Consumer Preference-Aware Requirements

From the business perspective, one of the core concerns within Business-IT alignment is coordinating strategic initiatives and plans with Information Systems (IS). However, while substantial work has been done on linking strategy to requirements for IS development, it has usually been focused on the core value exchanges offered by the business, overlooking other aspects influencing the implementation of strategy. One of these, consumer preferences, has been proven to influence the successful provisioning of the business’s customer value proposition, and this study aims to establish a conceptual link between them and system requirements. The core contention is that reflecting consumer preferences through business strategy in system requirements allows for the development of systems aligned to consumer preferences, and therefore systems that better support a consumer orientation, where the reasoning behind a particular solution stems from them. The contribution of this paper is the proposal of a consumer preference meta-model along with an illustration of its relationship to a requirements’ technique (i*) through the Strategy Maps business strategy formulation.