Abstract
Fitting information systems to business needs is considered equally important by both, the Requirements Engineering and MIS communities. Even though alignment/fit clearly appears as desirable, a number of issues still remain unsolved as for example: (i) the achievement of alignment (ii) its management over time, (iii) the identification of non fit and, (iv) its evaluation. This paper gives to fitness a central position and introduces the notion of a fitness relationship and its measurement. In doing so, this paper tackles the social context and requirements intertwining as pointed out in the book framework. It highlights two sets of issues, one involved in understanding this relationship and the second in engineering it. It also points out broad directions and trends in resolving these issues.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Potts, C.: Fitness for use: The system quality that matters most. In: 3rd International Workshop on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (1997)
Luftman, J., Maclean, E.R.: Key issues for it executives. MIS Quarterly Executive 3, 89–104 (2004)
Reich, B.H., Nelson, K.M.: In their own words: Cio visions about the future of in-house it organizations. The DATA BASE for Advances in ISs 34, 28–44 (2003)
Tallon, P., Kraemer, K.L.: Executives Perspectives on IT: Unraveling the Link between Business Strategy, Management Practices and IT Business Value (2002)
Watson, R.T., Kelly, G.G., Galliers, R.D., Brancheau, J.: Key issues in iss management: an int. perspective. Journal of Management ISs 13, 91–115 (1997)
Brancheau, J.C., Janz, B.D., Wetherbe, J.C.: Key issues in information systems management: 1994-1995 sim delphi results. MIS Quarterly 20(2), 225–242 (1996)
Chan, Y.E., Huff, S.L., Copeland, D.G., Barclay, D.W.: Business strategic orientation, ISs strategic orientation and strategic alignment. ISs Research 8(2), 125–150 (1997)
Kefi, H., Kalika, M.: Survey of strategic alignment impacts on organizational performance in international european companies. In: 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2005)
Chan, Y.E.: Why haven’t we mastered alignment? the importance of the informal organization structure. MIS Quarterly Executive 1(2), 97–112 (2002)
Sabherwal, R., Chan, Y.E.: Alignment between business and is strategies: A study of prospectors, analyzers and defenders. ISs Research 12(1), 11–33 (2001)
Croteau, A.M., Bergeron, F.: An information technology trilogy: business strategy, technological deployment and organizational performance. Journal of Strategic IS 10, 77–99 (2001)
Hirschheim, R., Sabherwal, R.: Detours in the Path toward Strategic Information Systems Alignment. California Management Review 44(1), 87–108
Soffer, P.: Fit measurement: How to distinguish between fit and misfit. In: Persson, A., Stirna, J. (eds.) CAiSE 2004. LNCS, vol. 3084, pp. 253–254. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Arsanjani, A., Alpigini, J.: Using grammar-oriented object design to seamlessly map business models to component-based software architectures. In: Symposium of Modelling and Simulation, pp. 186–191 (2001)
Alves, C., Finkelstein, A.: Challenges in cots decision-making: a goal-driven requirements engineering perspective. In: Workshop on Software Engineering Decision Support in conjunction with SEKE 2002, pp. 789–794 (2002)
Rolland, C.: Capturing intentionality with maps. In: Krogstie, J., Opdahl, A.L., Brinkkemper, S. (eds.) Conceptual modelling in information system engineering. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Rolland, C., Prakash, N.: Matching erp system functionality to customer requirements. In: 5th IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, pp. 66–75. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2001)
Regev, G., Wegmann, A.: Remaining fit: On the creation and maintenance of fit. In: Persson, A., Stirna, J. (eds.) CAiSE 2004. LNCS, vol. 3084, pp. 131–137. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Nadler, D., Tushman, M.L.: A congruence Model for Diagnosing Organizational Behavior. In: Miles, R. (ed.) Resource Book in Macro Organizational Bahavior, pp. 30–49 (1980)
Clarke, S., Harrison, W., Ossher, H., Tarr, P.: Subject-oriented design: Towards improved alignment of requirements, design and code. In: Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (1999)
Pohl, K., Jacobs, S.: Oncurrent engineering: Enabling traceability and mutual understanding. Journal of Concurrent Engineering Research and Application, Special Issue on Concurrent Engineering and Artificial Intelligence 2(4), 279–290 (1994)
De Landtsheer, R., Letier, E., van Lamsweerde, A.: Deriving tabular event-based specifications from goal-oriented requirements models. In: 11th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering, p. 200. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2003)
Krishna, A., Ghose, A.K., Vilkomir, S.A.: Co-evolution of complementary formal and informal requirements. In: 7th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution in conjonction with IWPSE 2004, pp. 159–164. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2004)
Etien, A., Rolland, C.: Measuring the fitness relationship. Requirements Engineering Journal 10(3), 184–197 (2005)
Bodhuin, T., Esposito, R., Pacelli, C., Tortorella, M.: Impact analysis for supporting the co-evolution of business processes and supporting software systems. In: BPMDS Workshop in connection with The 16th Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, pp. 146–150 (2004)
Soffer, P., Wand, Y.: Goal-driven analysis of process model validity. In: Persson, A., Stirna, J. (eds.) CAiSE 2004. LNCS, vol. 3084, pp. 521–535. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Wand, Y., Weber, R.: An ontological model of an information system. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 16(11), 1282–1292 (1990)
Cavano, J., McCall, J.: A framework for the measurement of software quality. In: Software Quality and Assurance Workshop, ACM SIGMETRICS and SIG-SOFT, pp. 133–139 (1978)
Sysml, http://www.sysml.org
Etien, A., Rolland, C.: A process for generating fitness measures. In: Pastor, Ó., Falcão e Cunha, J. (eds.) CAiSE 2005. LNCS, vol. 3520, pp. 277–292. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Thevenet, L.H., Salinesi, C.: Aligning is to organization’s strategy: The InStAlMethod. In: Krogstie, J., Opdahl, A.L., Sindre, G. (eds.) CAiSE 2007 and WES 2007. LNCS, vol. 4495, pp. 203–217. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Potts, C., Hsi, I.: Abstraction and context in requirements engineering: Toward a synthesis. Annals of Software Engineering 3, 23–61 (1997)
Weidenhaupt, K., Pohl, K., Jarke, M., Haumer, P.: CREWS Team. Scenario Usage in System Development: a Report on Current Practice. In: 3rd International Conference on Requirements Engineering (1998)
Cockburn, A.: Writing Effective Use Cases. Addison-Wesley, Reading (2000)
Ben Achour, C.: Extraction des Besoins par Analyse de Scénarios Textuels. Phd Thesis, Univ. Paris 6 - Pierre et Marie Curie (1999)
Kamsties, E., von Knethen, A., Reussner, R.: A Controlled Experiment on the Understandability of Different Requirements Specifications Styles. In: 8th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (2002)
Salinesi, C., Rolland, C.: Fitting business models to system functionality exploring the fitness relationship. In: Eder, J., Missikoff, M. (eds.) CAiSE 2003. LNCS, vol. 2681, pp. 647–664. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Rolland, C., Grosz, G., Kla, R.: Experience with goal-scenario coupling in requirements engineering. In: 4th IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, p. 74. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (1999)
Rolland, C., Salinesi, C., Etien, A.: Eliciting gaps in requirements change. Requirement Engineering Journal 9(1), 1–15 (2004)
Rolland, C.: Aligning Business and System Functionality Through Model Matching, Systèmes dInformation et Management (SIM). Editions ESKA (2006)
Jackson, M.: Software Requirements and Specifications. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1995)
Prechelt, L., Mahpohl, G., Phlippsen, M.: Jplag. finding plagiarisms among a set of programs. Technical Report 2000-1, Universität Karlsruhe (2000)
Sarireta, A., Vaucher, J.: Similarity measure in the object model. In: Aksit, M., Matsuoka, S. (eds.) ECOOP 1997. LNCS, vol. 1241. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Blok, M.C., Cybulski, J.L.: Reusing uml specifications in a constrained application domain. In: 5th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, pp. 196–202. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (1998)
Delgado, C., Samos, J., Torres, M.: Primitive operations for schema evolution in ODMG databases. In: Konstantas, D., Léonard, M., Pigneur, Y., Patel, S. (eds.) OOIS 2003. LNCS, vol. 2817, pp. 226–237. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Lautemann, S.E.: Schema versions in object-oriented database systems. In: 5th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, pp. 323–332. World Scientific, Singapore (1997)
Banerjee, J., Kim, W., Kim, H.J., Korth, H.F.: Semantics and implementation of schema evolution in object-oriented databases. In: Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Management of Data 1987 Annual Conference, pp. 311–322. ACM Press, New York (1987)
Casati, F., Ceri, S., Pernici, B., Pozzi, G.: Workflow evolution. In: Thalheim, B. (ed.) ER 1996. LNCS, vol. 1157, pp. 438–455. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)
Kradolfer, M.: A Workflow Metamodel Supporting Dynamic, Reuse-based Model Evolution. Ph.d. thesis, Department of Information Technology, University of Zurich (2000)
Reichert, M., Rinderle, S., Dadam, P.: A Formal Framework For Workflow Type And Instance Changes Under Correctness Constraints (2003)
Salinesi, C., Etien, A., Zoukar, I.: A systematic approach to express is evolution requirements using gap modelling and similarity modelling techniques. In: Persson, A., Stirna, J. (eds.) CAiSE 2004. LNCS, vol. 3084, pp. 338–352. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Lehman, M.M., Ramil, J.F., Kahen, G.: Evolution as a noun and evolution as a verb. In: Workshop on Software and Organisation Co-evolution (2000)
Mitleton-Kelly, E., Papaefthimiou, M.C.: Co-evolution & an enabling infrastructure: a solution to legacy? In: Systems engineering for business process change. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Kardasis, P., Loucopoulos, P.: Aligning legacy information systems to business processes. In: Pernici, B., Thanos, C. (eds.) CAiSE 1998. LNCS, vol. 1413, pp. 25–39. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)
Etien, A., Rolland, C., Salinesi, C.: Measuring the business/system alignment. In: Requirements Engineering for Business Need and IT Alignment (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rolland, C. (2009). Exploring the Fitness Relationship between System Functionality and Business Needs. In: Lyytinen, K., Loucopoulos, P., Mylopoulos, J., Robinson, B. (eds) Design Requirements Engineering: A Ten-Year Perspective. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 14. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92966-6_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92966-6_18
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-92965-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-92966-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)