Deriving information requirements from responsibility models

This paper describes research in understanding the require- ments for complex information systems that are constructed from one or more generic COTS systems. We argue that, in these cases, behavioural requirements are largely de ned by the underlying system and that the goal of the requirements engineering process is to understand the in- formation requirements of system stakeholders. We discuss this notion of information requirements and propose that an understanding of how a socio-technical system is structured in terms of responsibilities is an e ective way of discovering this type of requirement. We introduce the idea of responsibility modelling and show, using an example drawn from the domain of emergency planning, how a responsibility model can be used to derive information requirements for a system that coordinates the multiple agencies dealing with an emergency.