Requirements engineering for integrating the enterprise

In an era of global economy, an enterprise must demonstrate agility in order to stay competitive. Agility requires continuous monitoring of the ever-changing business landscape and quick adaptation to that change. Often times, this means businesses must merge to form strategic partnerships allowing them to provide new products and services. Such partnerships create the need for critical information to flow seamlessly across the newly formed enterprise and be available on demand for effective collaboration and decision making. However, the legacy business information systems that each partner brings into the newly formed enterprise typically have a very narrow focus serving the needs of a single business unit within an enterprise. As such, it becomes necessary to integrate multiple different systems before the right information can be delivered to the right person at the right time. Integrating disparate systems from a technical perspective is not hard to achieve since the Webservices standard is fairly mature and provides an open infrastructure for software systems to interoperate. One must, however, first understand the need and level of cooperation and collaboration among the different segments of an enterprise, its suppliers, and its customers in order for this integration to be effective. This chapter motivates the need for model-driven requirements engineering for enterprise integration, reviews the research to date on model-driven requirements engineering, and examines a case study on integrating health-care providers to form integrated health networks to gain insight into challenges and issues.