IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

3.7. The 'Statement of Requirements' (SoR) trap

An integral part of the standard client–vendor relationship that IT uses, based on the construction industry, is a contractually signed-off requirements specifications document. This phase starts with business analysts (also known as systems analysts) sitting down with business users in an attempt to understand their requirements, ultimately producing a thick document that nobody, even with the best of intentions, can really fully understand. Once the so-called 'statement of requirements' (SoR) has been duly signed off by the business, IT will then try to build (or in conjunction with the business, to buy) a system to meet those requirements. A typical scenario for a non-trivial project would usually play out as follows:

• It takes at least three months for business analysts to produce a SoR of up to a hundred of pages or more.

• It then takes another three months before it becomes politically acceptable to agree that not many people understand it, neither the users – and sometimes not even those in IT who have to use it to buy or build a software solution to meet these 'requirements'.

• Finally a system is bought or built to correspond to these requirements – with the results you can guess by now – or you have to start all over again.

So though the final deliverable theoretically corresponds to documented requirements, it stands little chance of corresponding to actual requirements – at best it represents a starting point for subsequent ...