INFORMATION STRATEGY : AN ANALYSIS FRAMEWORK

Strategic Information Requirements define which information an enterprise needs to operate and manage its business. These requirements are told “strategic”, since they are at a very high abstraction level, and reflect what managers want to know about operations. In an ideal world, managers would simply express their needs in natural language and the analyst will translate them in actual systems. To get close to these ideal results, a key point is to structure requirements and go from a strategic level, suitable for managers but not for IT analysts, to a semantic level, suitable for IT analysts. For this purpose, we here present an approach to Strategic Information Requirements Elicitation (SIRE). It includes (a) a meta-model (b) analysis steps and (c) a software tool. The meta-model describes the information domains of the enterprise. The design steps specifies the activities the analyst should perform to go from a strategic level to an engineering level. SIRE is based on some key ideas. First, an enterprise processes information made of universal information domains, which include stakeholders, products, process and contexts. By specializing these domains the analyst identifies domains specific to individual enterprises. Second, whatever domain includes different information types: master information, that defines structural properties, transaction information that describes events, indicators, that describe performances. By crossing information domains and types the analyst identifies Strategic Information Entities (SIE). The method requires few definitions and is readily understood by management and users. Of course, it can be used to design new systems. Additionally, it can be used in information systems planning to assess the coverage of current systems (fill-gap analysis). The tool enables to store high level schemas that can be mapped against real database schemas of commercial software platforms to understand their coverage.