Early Requirements and Business-IT Alignment with SEAM for Business

The early requirements of an IT system should be aligned with the organization’s business imperatives. To understand these imperatives it is necessary to understand the organization’s position within its environment. SEAM for Business is a method designed for analyzing the competitive environment of an organization, including its relationships with its customers, partners, and market regulators. From this analysis, the main requirements of the IT systems can be inferred. We illustrate the use of SEAM for Business with a real project aimed at redesigning the website of a consulting company

A Systematic Classification and Analysis of NFRs

The main agenda of Requirements Engineering (RE) is the development of tools, techniques and languages for the elicitation, specification, negotiation, and validation of software requirements. However, this development has traditionally been focused on functional requirements (FRs), rather than non-functional requirements (NFRs). Consequently, NFR approaches developed over the years have been fragmental and there is a lack of clear understanding of the positions of these approaches in the RE process. This paper provides a systematic classification and analysis of 89 NFR approaches

Technology-Transfer Requirements Engineering (TTRE) – on the Value of Conceptualizing Alternatives

In this paper, we describe a requirements engineering methodwith a focus on the conceptualization of alternative service offerings. Thepractical context for our project is based on the first author’s work in astartup. Our proposed method is suitable for exploring market opportu-nities while specifying a service offering. Our method helps requirementsengineering practitioners understand the business and technology worldsby modeling business needs and technical capabilities in the same model

Business and IT Design with SEAM: An Illustration with the PhD Hiring Process at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Companies seek to align their business with their IT. This alignment is important to maximize the return on their IT investment in their business. One major challenge is to develop models that can be understood by both business and IT stakeholders. Without such models, it is difficult for stakeholders to reach a shared understanding and to agree on what the issues and solutions are. We present a method called SEAM: it uses a systemic approach for representing business and IT organizations. With SEAM, stakeholders can quickly develop an understanding of the problem and gain knowledge on how to address it. This improves the success rate of business and IT projects

The Integration of an RE Method and AHP: A Pilot Study in a Large Swiss Bank

This paper reports on a pilot study of the integration between the Systemic Enterprise Architecture Method (SEAM) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in a requirements engineering project. The objective of the project, conducted in one of the major banks in Switzerland, was to select a common SOA tool that could satisfy the needs of two of the bank’s main business units, investment and private banking. SEAM provided help in identifying stakeholders, eliciting their requirements, and analyzing these requirements. The resulting requirements were then grouped and translated into selection criteria for the alternative SOA tools. Based on these criteria, the stakeholders chose the tool to be purchased using AHP. We describe the project, the challenges we faced and the lessons learned. These relate to the nature and traceability of requirements, to the requirements elicitation process and to the relations between the bank’s business units

Service Systems and Value Modeling from an Appreciative System Perspective

Since its inception Service Science has created a substantial body of knowledge about services and their provision. Most notably, the concept of Service System was defined in order to describe the co-creation of value by the service provider and customer. We introduce the concept of Appreciative System defined by Vickers in the study of the way individuals and organizations apprehend and act on their environment. We show how the appreciative system concept can be applied to a service system model with the SEAM enterprise architecture method

Requirements modeling in SEAM: The example of a car crash management system

This paper presents how business and IT requirements are captured with the Systemic Enterprise Architecture Methodology (SEAM). The method is applied to the Car Crash Management System (CMS) - Software Product Line (SPL) case study. The existing business situation is analyzed. We identify the problems and list relevant solutions. We select one of these solutions for which we define the business and the IT requirements. We then present the two components of SEAM used in this paper, goal-belief and behavior modeling. We end the paper by presenting the systemic foundations of SEAM

A Developing World Perspective on the Design of Wireless Enabled Humanitarian Relief Services

In the absence of adequate state support, societies in the developing world have long relied on community support for humanitarian relief. Such community networks provide a readily available platform for delivery of humanitarian relief services. Wireless technologies can play an important role in enabling humanitarian relief applications that strengthen these community networks by facilitating the flow of information amongst the community members. Nevertheless, given the welfare nature of the activity, these applications face some strict design constraints that emerge from the larger socio-political-economic landscape. This paper presents a systematic approach to unearth the requirements that these domains may impose on the design of wireless enabled information and communication oriented humanitarian relief services, wiHRS. We describe SEAM, a systems thinking inspired conceptual framework that provides the theoretical underpinnings of the modeling apparatus used in this paper. As an example, we demonstrate the relevance of this framework to the design of wiHRS by analyzing the economics of enhanced information flow in community networks and how this analysis can be exploited to reflect on the financial viability of such services by, say, soliciting support from financial risk management instruments like insurance schemes

Augmenting the Zachman Enterprise Architecture Framework with a Systemic Conceptualization

The Zachman Framework offers a classification of the models created in an enterprise architecture project. These models form a holistic representation of the organization. Despite the prominent position of the Framework, there is little information publicly available to help designers create exact models that fit each other. In this paper, we propose a conceptualization based on General Systems Thinking. Our conceptualization provides concrete guidelines for creating the models required by the Framework. The proposed conceptualization establishes a better understanding of the models and of their relationships. This facilitates the creation and interpretation of the models. It also improves the traceability between them. We illustrate our approach with the results of a case study