Challenges of the Customer Organization's Requirements Engineering Process in the Outsourced Environment - A Case Study

[Context and motivation] The increasingly complex business and development environment brings challenges to IT system development and requirements engineering (RE) activities. [Question/problem] The goal of the case study was to investigate what the challenges of a customer organization’s RE process are in the outsourced development environment and what demands these challenges bring to RE process development. The case study was conducted in a Finnish insurance company. [Principal ideas/results] The results are based on 17 interviews and the analysis of 15 large projects. The case study indicates that one of the biggest challenges is to develop business and IT as a whole. When combining business process and IT system development, requirements are an important tool. Another critical challenge in the outsourced environment is that the RE process is distributed between the customer organization and the supplier. Furthermore, highly integrated IT systems and enterprise architecture bring demands to RE process. [Contribution] The paper describes a complex environment in which the customer organization develops IT systems, and systematically defines challenges related to the RE process.