Strategic Release Planning Challenges For Global Information Systems

and comprises an evolving customer relationship management (CRM) system

with country speciﬁc local implementations. The CRM system stakeholders are

segmented in diﬀerent company business units such as sales, marketing or ser-

vice units. Altogether that constitutes a heterogeneous group of stakeholders,

which have diﬀerent business unit priorities. CRM system roadmaps are cre-

ated per business unit by so called Change Advisory Boards (CABs) where the

board members involve IT people and business unit representatives comprising

the respective key stakeholder in the diﬀerent countries. Priorities of the speciﬁc

business units are deﬁned by a company panel and depend on the governance

structure. Still, these priorities are not static and can change due to diﬀerent

reasons such as changes in the market or the need to integrate acquired compa-

nies.

The elements of a typical roadmap are high-level features, which represent

the IT view on the according business topics (e.g. the topic interoperability of

business across diﬀerent countries results in a master data management feature)

associated with a time frame and cost estimations. These high-level features are

derived from two diﬀerent channels. The ﬁrst channel is business strategy driven

based on changing markets, regulatory law or new technology capabilities. The

second channel is end user feedback driven where the end users of the IS raise

bug, feature or change requests. These requests encompass a pool of requirements

of diﬀerent abstraction levels and are used by IT to suggest further features.

Therefore, feature creation is done top-down by reﬁning business topics into

features and bottom-up by bundling related low-level requirements into features.

Strategic release planning considers a time horizon of three years that com-

prises typically two release cycles per year. The focus of SRP activities is on

new features neglecting the validation of existing features in terms of usage and

suitability.

Since local impacts on a global IS for health care business are very strong, the

company aims at providing transnational IS which are oriented on regions such

as Asia Paciﬁc and Japan. These regional solutions cluster countries based on

geographic distribution and similar market environments. Customization based

on regions is assuming that countries, sharing similar markets, also share similar

customization needs. At this point software product line [10] concepts seem to

be appropriate, but there are several reasons why software product line develop-

ment is not possible or diﬃcult in this company. One reason is that the existing

software architecture is not suitable. Another reason is that the company wishes

to limit the IS variability and not to encourage it.

3.2

Identiﬁed Challenges of Global Strategic Release Planning

The following challenges regarding SRP have been identiﬁed together with the

health care company and are discussed in this section.

The major problem of SRP for a global IS, based on the authors experiences

in the health care domain, is to balance standardization and customization pos-

sibilities of the IS. On the one side standardization of the IS reduces costs for

Strategic Release Planning Challenges For Global Information Systems - A Position Paper Page 3