Requirements for Electronic Commerce Applications are created rather than elicited

Electronic commerce applications are a challenging new class of information systems. Due to the everincreasing technical possibilities, new, yet undiscovered ways of doing business are possible. Therefore, requirements for e-commerce systems can hardly be elicited but instead need to be created because elicitation requires a dormant view of users on requirements. Also, E-commerce systems are, in contrast to other information systems, an intrinsic part of the product or service a company offers to others. Therefore, developing the business model, which represents the offering, and defining the requirements for a supporting e-commerce system, is not a sequential process and, neither can it be done in a decoupled way. Current requirements engineering methodology does not support requirements creation nor deals with information system requirements as an intrinsic part of developing business models. We outline a structured approach to e-commerce requirements creation called e-VALUE. This approach identifies three views to be developed: (1) the e-business model view, (2) the e-business process view and (3), the esoftware architecture view. We discuss the e-business model view in more detail and discuss a more formal way to represent business models. In our interpretation of ‘business model’, the notion of value is a central theme. We illustrate our e-VALUE by presenting an experience report.