Paul Stynes¹, Owen Conlan² and Declan O'Sullivan³, ¹National College or Ireland, Ireland and ^2,3Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Communicating an organisation's requirements in a semantically consistent and understandable manner and then reflecting the potential impact of those requirements on the IT infrastructure presents a major challenge among stakeholders. Initial research findings indicate a desire among business executives for a tool that allows them to communicate organisational changes using natural language and a simulation of the IT infrastructure that supports those changes. Building on a detailed analysis and evaluation of these findings, the innovative CRESUS tool was designed and implemented. The purpose of this research was to investigate to what extent CRESUS both aids communication in the development of a shared understanding and supports collaborative requirements elicitation to bring about organisational, and associated IT infrastructural, change. This paper presents promising results that show how such a tool can facilitate collaborative requirements elicitation through increased communication around organisational change and the IT infrastructure.

Collaborative requirements elicitation, Shared Understanding, and Semantically enabled web services.