Knowledge Transfer through User-Analyst Collaboration during Requirements Elicitation

Requirements elicitation is a critical phase in information systems development (ISD), having significant impacts on software quality and costs. Prior research suggests that it is a collaborative activity, where system requirements-related knowledge is extensively shared between users and analysts. This knowledge sharing can get extremely tenuous given the different knowledge perspectives of the two participant groups. However, till date, no known research has attempted to understand how this collaborative process unfolds and how knowledge is shared between users and analysts. Using data from in-depth interviews with analysts from two organizations, the proposed research study attempts to understand how the requirements elicitation process unfolds, how knowledge is shared, and what impedes/enables knowledge transfer in this critical process.