Requirements engineering for organizational transformation

Traditional approaches to requirements elicitation stress systematic and rational analysis and representation of organizational context and system requirements. This paper argues that the introduction of any computer-based system to an organization transforms the organization and changes the work patterns of the system’s users in the organization. These changes interact with the users’ values and beliefs and trigger emotional responses which are sometimes directed against the computerbased system and its proponents. The paper debunks myths about how smoothly such organizational transformations take place, describes case studies showing how organizational transformation really takes place, and introduces and confirms by case studies some guidelines for eliciting requirements and the relevant emotional issues for a computer-based system that is being introduced into an organization to change its work patterns. 1 Daniel Berry’s work was supported in part by a Canadian NSERC grant, NSERCRGPIN227055-00. Preprint submitted to Elsevier Science 29 September 2004