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Accident versus Essence:  Investigating the Relationship Among Information Systems Development and Requirements Capabilities and Perceptions of Enterprise Architecture (open access)

Accident versus Essence: Investigating the Relationship Among Information Systems Development and Requirements Capabilities and Perceptions of Enterprise Architecture

Information systems (IS) are indelibly linked to the global economy and are indispensable to society and organizations. Despite the decisive function of IS in organizations today, IS development problems continue to plague organizations. The failure to get the system requirements right is considered to be one of the primary, if not the most significant, reasons for this high IS failure rate. Getting requirements right is most notably identified with Frederick Brooks' contention that requirements are the essence of what IT professionals do, all the rest being accidents or risk management. However, enterprise architecture (EA) may also provide the discipline to bridge the gap between effective requirements, organizational objectives, and the actual IS implementations. The intent of this research is to examine the relationship between IS development capabilities and requirements analysis and design capabilities within the context of enterprise architecture. To accomplish this, a survey of IT professionals within the Society for Information Management (SIM) was conducted. Results indicate support for the hypothesized relationship between IS development and requirements capabilities. The hypothesized relationships with the organizational demographics were not supported nor was the hypothesized positive relationship between requirements capabilities and EA perceptions. However, the nature of the relationship of requirements and …
Date: August 2009
Creator: Salmans, Brian R.
System: The UNT Digital Library