How Shared is Shared Understanding in Information Requirements Determination?

Abstract

The task of determining information requirements for information systems is notoriously challenging and a number of contributing difficulties have been ascribed as causal factors including the problem of achieving a shared understanding of information requirements. However, a ubiquitous and perhaps naive assumption has always been that approaches which explicate ‘shared understanding’ do just that ie they achieve a very high degree of mutual understanding between participants. The findings in this paper contradict that view. An approach which is well-respected for its ability to facilitate shared understanding, SODA (Strategic Options Development and Analysis) and its associated technique of cognitive mapping were applied in an action research project in which the degree of mutual understanding between individual participants was measured by cross-tabulating individual cognitive maps. A qualitative data analysis was then performed. The findings demonstrate that in this case at least, espoused ‘shared understanding’ was limited. The paper also describes how further steps were successfully introduced which appear to improve the degree of mutual understanding.