Requirements Definition for Enterprise Information Portals: An Integrated Method for Specifying Quantitative and Qualitative Information Needs

Rational and funded management decisions require both quantitative and qualitative information from internal and external resources. New information system architectures like enterprise information portals provide a personalized single gateway to quantitative information, which is mainly provided by data warehouse and OLAP systems for analysis purposes, as well as to qualitative information, which can be administered by content management systems. As the engineering of enterprise information portals meeting managers’ special information needs is a complex process, there is a need for suitable approaches to support in particular the requirements definition. While graphical models like ER models, flow-chart-diagrams etc. are wide spread and accepted by executives as well as system developers for system requirements specification, an adequate modeling language for the domain of enterprise information portals is missing. This contribution proposes such a modeling language. Its specification is formalized in terms of a model: a meta-model. Therefore, we fall back on another approach for requirements specification of Management Information Systems, extending and adapting this for EIP’s special requirements.