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Research field

Requirements Engineering and Business-IT Alignment

Requirements Engineering (ReqEng) denotes the set of activities concerned with identifying and communicating the purpose of an information system, and the contexts in which it will be used. ReqEng acts as the bridge between the real world needs of users, customers and other stakeholders, and the capabilities of information technology (IT). Its main outcome is the requirements document that guides the work of developers. ReqEng is widely considered as the most crucial task during software engineering (SE).

Business IT-Alignment (BIA) is the set of activities ensuring that an organisation's investments in, and usage of IT is consistent with its business strategy and effectively serves the organization's business strategic objectives. This alignment requires that the IT infrastructure and applications are defined and implemented by taking into account the business strategy, but it also views IT as a support to define and enable new business models and innovate at the business level. IT subsumes software, hardware and all other necessary information infrastructure in the broad sense (including e.g. management of IT capabilities and IT services).

Both ReqEng and BIA rely on the premise that IT is valuable only to the extent that it enables an organization to meet its goals cost-effectively, in time, and while assuming an acceptable level of risk.

ReqEng and BIA research seeks to elaborate and evaluate techniques that help identify, visualize, document, analyse, retrieve, and reason on, organizational requirements so as to guarantee an adequate realization through IT. Support for prioritization, negotiation and risk management is also a major concern. Among the main current challenges of ReqEng and BIA are (i) the complexity and heterogeneity of today's organizations and information systems, (ii) the accelerating pace of organizational change, (iii) the increasingly pervasive and changing technology, and (iv) dealing with fuzzy and conflicting information.

Research Units involved

Running projects (8)

Terminated projects (18)

PHDs (14)