An Approach for Identifying Business Requirements for Development of Prospective ERP Systems
There are many difficulties in developing business requirements when developing prospective enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs). There exist no approaches for requirements development for prospective ERPs. Using a design science research approach,
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Abstract There are many difficulties in developing business requirements when developing prospective enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs). There exist no approaches for requirements development for prospective ERPs. Using a design science research approach, we develop an approach for requirements development for prospective ERPs. The approach is presented and we discuss how it can be used. The main features of the approach are scenarios and narratives, and we show how these, using different sources, can be developed.
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Introduction
To identify, gather, and specify requirements in information systems development are non-trivial activities to carry out [1]. The elicitation of requirements is critical in information systems development (ISD) [2–4]. A vast amount of approaches, methodologies, methods, and techniques exist for requirements elicitation in ISD. These approaches, focus on requirements elicitation in situation where one develops an information system for a specific organisation and in many cases also for a limited number of functionalities and users. For enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs), very little exist in terms of approaches. Some have addressed this by developing support for organisations when they are to buy or rent an ERP [3, 5–7]. That is a focus on the user side. When looking at the developer side, the organisations developing ERPs, nothing exists. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss an approach for identifying and describing business requirements for the development
B. Johansson (*) • S.A. Carlsson Department of Informatics, Lund University, Ole Römers väg 6, SE-223 63 Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] H. Linger et al. (eds.), Building Sustainable Information Systems: Proceedings 247 of the 2012 International Conference on Information Systems Development, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-7540-8_19, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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of prospective ERPs. If it is hard to identify requirements for information systems in general, it can be argued that identifying requirement for ERPs is even harder. One reason is the fact that ERPs are a type of information systems that are supposed to address more or less all concerned functions of an organisation [8]. After having reviewed relevant literature, we conclude that there is a gap in practice and research on how developer of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software, such as ERPs, can identify requirements when developing ERPs for the future. The work presented here aims at describing and developing guidelines for identifying ERP requirements. It does so by employing an ERP requirements approach that suggests sources for finding future requirements. Hence, the basic problem addressed is how to identify business requirements when developing prospective ERPs. Since the research is solution driven—the development and evaluation of an approach for generating requirements for prospective ERPs—the research approach is design science research (DSR). DSR aims at developing nove
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