What Practitioners Think of Inter-organizational ERP Requirements Engineering Practices: Focus Group Results

Empirical studies on requirements engineering for inter-organizational enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have demonstrated that the ERP vendor-provided prescriptive models for ERP roll-outs make tacit assumptions about the ERP adopter’s context. This, in turn, leads to the implementation of suboptimal solutions. Specifically, these models assume that ERP implementations happen within a single company, and so they pay only scant attention to the stakeholders’ requirements for inter-organizational coordination. Given this backdrop, the first author proposed 13 practices for engineering the ERP coordination requirements in previous publications. This paper reports a confirmatory study evaluating those practices. Using an online focus group, the authors collected and analyzed practitioners’ feedback and their experiences to understand the extent to which the proposed practices are indeed observable. The study indicated very low variability in practitioners’ perceptions regarding 12 of the 13 practices, and considerable variability in their perceptions regarding the role of modeling inter-organizational coordination requirements. The contribution of the study is twofold: (1) it adds to the body of knowledge in the sub-area of RE for ERP; and (2) it adds to the practice of using qualitative research methods in empirical RE.