Requirements management for the Oceanographic Information System at the Naval Oceanographic Office

Recognizing the complexity of the interdependencies in a diverse information system, NAVOCEANO is conducting a rigorous overhaul of the Requirements Management process to standardize, develop, and maintain the requirements that the OIS is intended to satisfy. The intended result is an integrated Requirements Enterprise Architecture Documentation (READ) suite for the OIS, expressed in database and document form that promotes interoperability and fiscal responsibility of IT acquisition. Once the requirements baseline is established, the requirements management process will provide a mechanism to establish, delete, and change requirements. To accomplish this result, our Systems Engineers have decomposed organizational policies, studies, and directives to extract general requirements and are soliciting detailed requirements from system users. Each requirement is linked to our existing Enterprise Architecture. The current Configuration Management (CM) process will be modified to account for the new Requirements Management process to ensure the validity of the READ suite. This paper will describe the process used, high level requirements documented, and the lessons learned in Requirements Management.