Authors: Atefeh Taghavi, Carson Woo
Tags: 2015, business activities, information systems, organizational analysis, requirements engineering, role ambiguity
To date, requirement engineering (RE) studies have proposed several methods for efficiently gathering requirements to develop information systems. As one of the most widely-used RE approaches, goal-oriented requirement engineering (GORE) determines requirements based on an organization’s goals for its information system. We believe, however, that further investigation is required to improve organizational analysis prior to elaborating the information system goals. The first step in organizational analysis should be defining business activities of users. To achieve such understanding, this paper develops a role clarity framework. Drawn from two organizational theories – role dynamics (Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek, & Rosenthal, 1964) and goal setting and task performance (Locke & Latham, 1990) – the role clarity framework operationalizes the concept of role ambiguity. According to the proposed framework, system analysts need to obtain possible activities assigned to an organizational role as the role’s business activities. In order to do this, a role’s expectations and consequences, as contextual information, should be collected to clarify the origin of business activities and evaluate business activities. This study is supported by a case study to analyze the proposed framework.
Cite as:
Taghavi A. and Woo C. (2015). “A Role Clarity Framework for Gathering Business Activities,” in AIS SIGSAND, Richmond, VA, United States, May 13-15, 2015.
