Requirements Modelling in International Information Systems Design - What Competencies are Needed and how to Manage Them?

Allocating the right competency to the right task is often critical in complex IS development projects, which often take place in a networked world with teams working across cultural barriers, time zones, and knowledge domains. The presented research explores knowledge and competency management issues raised in the early phases of requirement analysis in international IS design projects. An important management challenge of requirement modelling is to balance user-facing and design-facing activities. Both domain knowledge and IS modelling skills are needed to achieve a correct and complete specification of requirements. Requirement modelling - eliciting, specifying, and evaluating stakeholders' requirements - calls on a variety of competencies. Some of these competencies can be derived from analysis of the information modelling processes, e. g., how communication in natural language with stakeholders informs visual representations of models meant to communicate precise requirements to developers of software or other IS artefacts. However, other competencies will be hard to describe, due to the complex organisation, and coordination and communication issues found in international and intercultural settings. The needed knowledge, skills and attitudes often surface only after some problem or breakdown of processes. Competency management in ISD, particularly in internationally distributed requirement practices, is not a well researched area. Therefore, this paper focusses on understanding how the competency domain is conceptualised in these settings as a first step towards formal competency descriptions. What processes are involved, and how are competencies derived from analysing these processes? How does an international context impact on the processes and related competencies? For example, will additional competencies in intercultural communication enable a system analyst to be a more efficient modeller? In self-recruited and intercultural teams, how are the critical competences that need management identified? This research contributes towards answering questions like these, by proposing a two-layer approach to identifying crucial competences in requirement modelling in an international context. A first layer establishes a broad set of competences identified by analysing the processes involved. The second layer of competences is a subset identified through studying breakdowns in enactment of the requirement processes. These competences are the candidates for interventions.