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Accident versus Essence: Investigating the Relationship Among Information Systems Development and Requirements Capabilities and Perceptions of Enterprise Architecture

Information systems (IS) are indelibly linked to the global economy and are indispensable to society and organizations. Despite the decisive function of IS in organizations today, IS development problems continue to plague organizations. The failure to get the system requirements right is considered to be one of the primary, if not the most significant, reasons for this high IS failure rate. Getting requirements right is most notably identified with Frederick Brooks' contention that requirements are the essence of what IT professionals do, all the rest being accidents or risk management. However, enterprise architecture (EA) may also provide the discipline to bridge the gap between effective requirements, organizational objectives, and the actual IS implementations. The intent of this research is to examine the relationship between IS development capabilities and requirements analysis and design capabilities within the context of enterprise architecture. To accomplish this, a survey of IT professionals within the Society for Information Management (SIM) was conducted. Results indicate support for the hypothesized relationship between IS development and requirements capabilities. The hypothesized relationships with the organizational demographics were not supported nor was the hypothesized positive relationship between requirements capabilities and EA perceptions. However, the nature of the relationship of requirements and EA provided important insight into the relationship leading to several explanations as to its meaning and contributions to research and practice. This research contributes to IS development knowledge by providing evidence of the essential role of requirements in IS development capabilities and in IS development maturity. Furthermore, contributions to the nascent field of EA research and practice include key insight into EA maturity, EA implementation success, and the role of IT professionals in EA teams. Moreover, these results provide a template and research plan of action to pursue further EA research in exploring EA maturity models and critical success factors, and the state of practice of EA in organizations