E-Government Requirements Specification Based on BPMN

Software requirements for e-government systems are not easy to specify. Among other reasons, e-government is characterized by complex, and often cross-organizational business processes. In search of effective approaches, BPMN has been seen as a prospectively beneficial aid. This paper presents an approach for e-government requirements specification based on BPMN. In the main, software requirements specification is conducted as the extension or elaboration of BPMN models. The approach is iterative, incremental, and highly flexible, so it can be adjusted to a required or chosen project management and/or development methodology. In addition, the paper critically analyzes the acceptability and effectiveness of the approach based on project artifacts and reflections of participants collected in several projects over time. More specifically, acceptability was found satisfactory based on the ratio of positive and negative comments per participant. Furthermore, the paper identifies and discusses the main factors influencing the effective use of the approach: model quality, familiarity of participants with BPMN, adequate collaboration between participants, and software support. In a nutshell, for the approach to be effective and acceptable, participants in an e-government project should be adequately familiarized with BPMN models, modeling principles, and guidelines that are followed. To this end, collaborative modeling and careful positioning of the models in the requirements specification are highly recommended.