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Investigating the Relationship between Business Analysts' Competency and IS Requirements Elicitation: A Thematic-analysis Approach

Researchers and practitioners have consistently reported poor requirements elicitation (RE) as one of the major reasons for information system (IS) project failures. In the last two decades, RE research and practice have focused predominantly on developing tools and techniques for business analysts (BAs) to use and improve RE; however, they have paid little attention to the importance of the competency of the BAs involved in RE. We investigate the relationship between the BAs’ competency and RE through an exploratory study. We applied a thematic network analysis approach, along with a four-stage qualitative data-analysis process, to discover four business view and six system view themes and their relationships to BAs’ competency. Our results indicate that senior, intermediate, and junior BAs performed similarly in selecting stakeholders’ viewpoints and collecting requirements from them; however, senior BAs focused more on high-level requirements than the low-level technical requirements of the system. The results suggest that BAs’ competency play a significant role in RE and that organizations that clearly define BAs’ competency can help them to identify the right BA for the right job.