A contingency view of organizational infrastructure requirements engineering

  • Authors:

  • Karl Cox;Steven J. Bleistein;Peter Reynolds;Alan Thorogood

  • Affiliations:

  • University of New South Wales, Australia;University of New South Wales, Australia;Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Australian Graduate School of Management, Sydney, Australia;Australian Graduate School of Management, Sydney, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Delivery of IT projects in today's rapidly changing business environment is a challenge. Conventional investment approaches result in lumpy capital allocations, which encourage managers to include many potential future business requirements in each capital request. This locks in the delivery of future requirements despite high market uncertainty. The resulting projects are large and complex from both a technical and management perspective. In the management literature, new frameworks are emerging that draw on Real Options valuations to justify early infrastructure investment and provide fine-grained control over business initiatives in an uncertain world. Business managers can then build on the infrastructure by selecting business initiatives to maximise option value. However, this requires engineering approaches that separates infrastructure and business requirements and minimises their dependencies. This paper explores a contingency approach to Requirements Engineering (RE) to minimise initial requirements and maximise future strategic options, challenging the research community's dominant paradigm of completeness, correctness and consistency.