A business unit of a transnational manufacturer wants to implement a robust process for addressing integritycritical equipment deterioration incidents. Timely and complete resolution of such incidents is vital for the
business unit’s continuous safe and profitable operation. Treating each incident involves many employees from
different departments extensively collaborating and exchanging information. That information is spread across
multiple systems having their access limited to particular user groups. With the current manual process, some
incidents get forgotten and remain unresolved for years.
The project’s Sponsor is an Equipment Integrity and Reliability Advisor, who moved into this position from
another business unit. That business unit implemented a proprietary application to integrate the information and
to assist in tracking and managing the incidents. Having a positive experience with the application, the Sponsor
is suggesting to customize it and reuse in the new business unit.
The business unit’s Enterprise Architect (EA), who is responsible for assessing solution options and presenting
them to executive decision makers, has a few concerns with adopting the existing application. The application
uses point-to-point interfaces with other data sources whereas the business unit’s target architecture relies on a
data warehouse-based integration. Moreover, the two business units use different legacy systems, as well as
different front-end implementation technologies. Additionally, the existing application is monolingual, while the
business unit needs user interfaces and some data to be presented in two languages. With all of this, it may be
easier to build a new application from scratch than to customize the existing one. To understand which option is
better, the EA asks a business analyst (BA) to define business requirements.
The EA wants to understand whether the integration capabilities of the existing solution match the business
unit's IT landscape. The requirement definition that the EA needs should read as, "Each record of an incident
shall __________."