Bridging requirements engineering and business process management

Abstract

Requirement elicitation is one of the earliest phases of a requirement engineering lifecycle. However, even though years of research have gone into seeking machine support for requirements engineering, the methods used are still highly manual and the vision of automatic transfer of business analysis requirements into IT systems supporting the business is still far from reach. On the other hand, incepting knowledge for creating AS-IS business processes in enterprise models has been recognized as a hard problem. In the context of a process centric organization, we propose an approach to create AS-IS business process models by automatically transferring requirements to the business process layer. Our aim is to enable carrying business requirements, goals and policies from an inception layer to the operational business process management layer. We place our research in the context of a semantic business process management platform (SUPER) as the support to exploit the output of our research. This paper grounds this research work and proposes a research design for requirement elicitation for producing early-phase business process models that are nearer to the business analysis layer.