Digitalisera loggboken : En analys av utmaningarna med att utveckla IT-stöd för kunskapsintensiva verksamheter

Sammanfattning: Failed system development projects are a common sight within the IT-industry. During the last ten years we have seen several more or less disastrous high profile projects being reported in the news. One aspect that might hold some of the responsibility for these failures is the fact that more organisations are knowledge intensive which makes their work processes difficult to capture in computer systems. How requirements engineering is handled becomes even more important in these cases, where processes are unpredictable and rely on individual judgement and knowledge. In this study we have examined the challenges of developing systems for knowledge intensive businesses through a method of qualitative case study of a university laboratory. The study included contextual and semi-structured interviews, and showed that work processes within this organisation are difficult to structure because they need to allow for a certain measure of freedom. It is also difficult to capture implicit knowledge and turn it into explicit knowledge contained within a computer system. Moreover different users often have different needs, and may also have difficulty expressing these clearly or imagining the possibilities that a system might present, which might limit their vision of what a future system might look like. All these aspects are factors that can make the requirements engineering more challenging.