Strategic Release Planning Challenges For Global Information Systems

required role would be responsible for the development of new business strate-

gies or models triggered through new IS capabilities or business environment

changes (e.g. globalization of markets). This entails that IT takes over business

responsibility, which is not always desired by the business. Therefore, a hybrid

role, comprising both business and IT power, could encourage the next steps to

harmonize business development and according IS evolution.

Related Work

In literature there are several approaches and models regarding the SRP process,

see [13]. However, all of these approaches neglect the global context of system

usage. Suomalainen et al. [12] provide a common product roadmapping process

and identiﬁed roadmapping process stakeholder. The described SRP process aims

at standardized products without considering customization opportunities. [1]

introduces a productization process that describes the transition from develop-

ing customer-speciﬁc software to a standard software product. However, e.g. C1

(business strategy similarity detection) is not supported or considered. Several

approaches focus on the enhanced linkage of the business view to the IT view

that is part of C2 by aligning business objectives with requirements [6][2][3][5].

Nevertheless, the aspect of global requirements or multiple country business

objectives is missing. Integration of variability-based feature modeling during

release planning is provided by [4] using feature trees to structure requirements.

However, a linking of the features to business objectives for validation of business

objective fulﬁllment (validation according to C3) is not addressed. Related to

software product management there exists the role of the product manager which

is responsible for creating and maintaining the release roadmaps [8]. It is not

clear which additional responsibilities are necessary to fulﬁll the missing role

described in C4.

Conclusion

This position paper presented the challenges for SRP of global IS from an in-

dustrial perspective. The major problem is balancing standardization and cus-

tomization possibilities of the IS. For this problem four challenges were identiﬁed

in a company in the health care domain. A preliminary literature review showed

that the problems of global SRP are not addressed in research. It is the aim of

our future work to deﬁne and evaluate a method for global SRP.

References

1. Artz, P., Weerd, I., Brinkkemper, S.: Productization: Transforming from devel-

oping customer-speciﬁc software to product software, Lecture Notes in Business

Information Processing, vol. 51, pp. 90–102. Springer Berlin Heidelberg (2010)

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