A Critical Systems Approach to Elicit User-Centric Business Intelligence Business Requirements

Abstract

This paper describes an action research study where the researcher developed and tested an alternative business requirements elicitation approach that enables reflection on business intelligence business requirements from a social/organisational perspective and, accordingly, surfaces user-centric requirements that support development of systems that are technically good and effectuate organisational improvement. It is based on critical systems heuristics, a framework that facilitates participative discourse to surface contributing and consequential factors of a planned social system, i.e. relevant sources of motivation; expertise; inflicting and controlling boundaries; and sources of moral and political justification acting as guardians for all that will be impacted upon by the adjusted social reality caused by the new system. Such an approach is valuable to developers of business intelligence systems; it complements traditional requirements gathering approaches. Present-day organisations require efficacious decision-making capabilities to succeed—business intelligence systems enable efficacious decisions. However, business intelligence systems often fail, at great expenses to organisations. They fail due to social/organisational infeasibility, rather than technical insufficiency; they fail when developers lack adequate understanding of users’ business requirements. Appropriate business requirement specifications entail more than definitions of functional, non-functional and technical attributes of new systems. Business requirements must also capture the social/organisational context of a system, i.e. the impact that it will inevitably have on users and the organisational environment, so as to ensure that it ultimately bring about improvement. The approach developed in this study enables elicitation of user-centric business requirements.