User-centered Requirements Elicitation for Business Intelligence Solutions

The implementation of Business Intelligence solutions, which support the planning, controlling and coordination processes of a company have been a high priority in the project portfolio of many IT departments in the last years. However, many of these projects could not fulfill the expectations due to an insufficient match with the actual business requirements. The research project described in this paper aims at closing this gap by developing an integrated, domain-specific method and tool support to enable user-centered requirements elicitation for BI solutions. 1 Motivation and research issue As more and more decision makers demand computerized support of their work, Business Intelligence (BI) software has become a shared commodity across organizations. However, in the design process of BI software and especially in the requirements engineering phase a lot of questions remain unanswered, resulting in BI projects that do not match project goals. According to the Business Intelligence literature, one of the main problems seems to be that business departments have difficulties to define their BI requirements. This problem is reported both concerning the general outcome of the process (Paim & Castro, 2003) as well as for the sub-processes BI requirements elicitation and BI requirements documentation (Strauch & Winter, 2002). To be more specific, in the elicitation phase, one of the main questions to be answered in a BI project is the question, which reports and which key figures are needed. These kinds 40 Hendrik Meth and Alexander Mädche of requirements often cannot be articulated by the users of the BI system, and decisions often follow gut instincts instead of a methodic approach (Röglinger, Reinwald, & Meier, 2009). Another aspect of this problem is the fact, that business requirements often focus on functional requirements and non-functional requirements like usability and user experience goals are neglected (Chung & do Prado Leite, 2009). Solutions, which are developed following these vague requirements, in many cases do not solve the underlying business needs, resulting in project failures. This is why welldefined information and systems requirements are stated as one of the top ten critical success factors for BI systems (Arnott, 2008). One of the causes of this problem is the fact, that substantial expert know-how is needed to run the BI requirements elicitation process, which is often resulting in comprehensive demand for training measures and/or expert resources (Kauppinen, Vartiainen, Kontio, Kujala, & Sulonen, 2004). The depicted problem shall be resolved by the definition of an integrated, domain-specific method and tool support to enable user-centered requirements elicitation for BI solutions. Within the BI domain, the research will focus on reporting and data warehouse applications. To be able to design this artifact the following research question needs to be answered: How can the elicitation of BI requirements be optimized to enable BI solutions with increased user acceptance and decreased implementation efforts?