Capturing Strategic Business Requirements: An Exploratory Study

Since IT systems are used to support business strategies of an organisation, strategic business requirements therefore are the motivation of the majority the requirements engineering approaches. But current requirements engineering approaches do not capture strategic business requirements but rather focus on functional and non-functional types of requirements. In this exploratory study two groups of business analysts explored requirements from a business scenario where different stakeholder views were given. A number of views represented the viewpoints of top management and the other views represented the viewpoints of operational level staff of the organisation. The collected data showed that the requirements captured from top management are different from the requirements captured from operational level staff in a way that strategic business requirements refer to the future direction of the organisation, however the requirements captured from operational level staff are about functionality and constraints of the system. The results indicate that strategic business requirements are associated to the top management and to capture them, business analysts have to pursue top management of the organsation.