Understanding and changing requirements development practices in enterprise system development

We report a field study of interactions between users and designers who were specifying requirements for an enterprise system. Conversations were tape-recorded and analyzed over time as participants worked together to develop requirements. The detailed analysis revealed a four-stage learning model that characterizes requirements development as a pathway from syntactic, to semantic, and to pragmatic nature of requirements. The findings led us and designers to co-develop a new requirements development methodology. The methodology was deployed through training sessions within the IT organization.