Business Requirements

The needs of the business processes which must be addressed by either a manual or computerised system. It is critical that the business requirements be clearly defined and documented, otherwise other issues may take its place, such as the recommendations of the IT group or supplier, which has a valid, but separate agenda. In many cases, business owners and managers find it seemingly complex to document their needs beyond high level requirements.

However, by recalling the tenets of Information Security, the high level requirements may be refined further by specifying the needs of the system with respect to, Confidentiality - who is able to see / amend what, Integrity - a system that is proven, tested and has security and fall back routines in case of need; and Availability - the system must be available (say) to users in multiple offices both on workstations and on their laptops.

The Business Requirements is a statement about what matters and the priority of those issues. Time spent in agreeing these is never time wasted.