Expanding the concept of requirements traceability: The role of electronic records management in gathering evidence of crucial communications and negotiations

Purpose – Despite its tremendous success and achievements, the information science (IS) industry has been plagued by shadows of failure and inefficiency since its early days. This paper takes the stance that poor communication with target organizations and users is one of the major causes of these problems. If this communication is not properly recorded and managed, many of the agreed decisions may never be assumed by target organizations, therefore leaving project managers entirely responsible for failures or deviation from initial requirements. Nonetheless, the vast majority of Software (SW) development companies have very weak provision for Electronic Records Management (ERM). This is evident from the persistent use of ISO 9001 and ISO 90003 in their Quality Assurance (QA) and the consistent neglecting of the ISO 15489 standard for records management. This paper aims to examine this issueDesign/methodology/approach – Since there are no studies in this area, this research employed an inductive qualitati...