The Living Requirements Space: Towards the Collaborative Development of Requirements for Future ERP Systems

Companies worldwide are faced with an increasingly volatile business environment. This leads to frequent changes in business requirements. The research described in this paper looks at the software development process for the supporting ERP System, standard software, which is generally available through specialised ERP software vendors. We argue that the cycle from gathering requirements to actually implementing them in the software has to be shortened and made more efficient. We propose the Living Requirements Space (LRS), a Web platform for the distributed gathering, storing and discussion of business requirements. Knowledge about business processes is often distributed among different experts. While most existing tools for requirements management are localized and often limited to a particular project or organization there is an increasing need for distributed heterogeneous collaboration. The proposed solution combines aspects from social software as well as from traditional business requirements modelling.