Carey Schwaber, Senior Analyst for Forrester provided a beehive of information and research with her talk “How Enterprises View Application Definition.” According to Schwaber, poor requirements practices are the root of the problem of application definition. But the customer doesn’t think of it as a requirements problem, they think of the problem as a testing issue. Dig deeper and the customer will see that the testing problem can be traced back to poor requirements configuration.

Problem with THAT is application simulation isn’t on a lot of business users’ radar. They don’t feel that they’re empowered to address requirements problems. To complicate matters, few CIOs truly care about requirements, they’re more concerned about the business-IT relationship. Generally, for the CIO, they believe the requirements problem is an issue for someone else, usually an IT person many levels below. It is the application group that cares most about requirements. Business customers, insecure about IT vocabulary are also insecure and conflicted about requirements. They don’t want to spend time on them, but they want to get them right and are afraid to sign off on them, said Schwaber.

Bring up an application like iRise and they can’t believe it doesn’t generate code. Amusingly for iRise they have to keep reassuring every person along the chain that iRise creates a simulation without generation code. That’s because “Does it generate code?” is everyone’s number one question when they use iRise, continued Schwaber.

Simulation, unlike requirements, relates directly to issues high on the CIO’s agenda. What they don’t often realize is that simulation can dramatically improve the requirements process. CIOs have the power to drive transformation across silos, but they need the help of a change agent which is not an easy job. Corporate and process change is not something you hand over to a person that you just had a conversation with. Scott McDowell of OneSpring spoke about this role. Change agents must help customers be evangelists of process change.

Schwaber has been following the application development market for quite some time and wrote a seminal report last year in which she separated out ‘definition’ from the ‘requirements management’ market.