An Organizational Actor Approach to Gathering Early Phase Requirements

Speaker:       Prof. Carson Woo
               Stanley Kwok Professor of Business, Sauder School of Business,  
               University of British Columbia 

Title:         "An Organizational Actor Approach to Gathering Early Phase                      
                           Requirements"

Date:          Monday, 23 June 2014

Time:          4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:         Rm 3501 (Lift 25/26), HKUST

 
Abstract:
The most common reasons cited for information system projects failure are
incorrect and incomplete requirements.  Many different approaches have been
proposed to overcome this type of failures.  One of them is the goal-based
requirements engineering approach.  For example, i* is an agent-based approach
used to supplement the traditional how and what aspects of requirements by
gathering the why aspect of early phase requirements.  In this talk, we propose
to extend the why part to include the internal view of organizational actors
(e.g., reasoning and learning).  Our approach is based on the intelligent agent
work in the artificial intelligence field but used them for requirements
gathering.  Since requirements gathering is different from producing artificial
intelligence in computers, we developed our internal view constructs based on
additional theories such as the theory of affordances, feedback system theory,
and the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology.  These internal view constructs provide an
additional dimension for systems analysts to understand the why part of
requirements.  To better understand the utility of our proposed contructs,
we conducted an empirical study to compare our approach and the i* framework.
The result shows that including the internal view of organizational actors
facilitated users in performing their problem-solving tasks.  This opens up
opportunities to further study internal view constructs of organizational actor.
 
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Short Bio:
Carson Woo is Stanley Kwok Professor of Business, Sauder School of Business,
University of British Columbia, and an associate member of the Department of
Computer Science at the same University.  He received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and
Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.  His research
interests include conceptual modeling, systems analysis and design, and
requirements engineering.  In particular, he is interested in using conceptual
models to help management in digesting information and deriving knowledge through
documentation, investigation, and planning.  Dr. Woo is editor of Information
Technology and Systems Abstracts Journal at the Social Science Research Network
(ITS-SSRN), and serves on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Management
Information Systems and Requirements Engineering.  He was conference co-chair of
the 29th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER'2010) and program
co-chair of the 14th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems
Engineering (CAiSE 2002).  He has served as President of Workshop on Information
Technology and Systems (WITS), Inc. (2004-2006) and chair of the ACM Special Interest
Group on Office Information Systems (SIGOIS) 1991-1995.