Strategic Release Planning Challenges For Global Information Systems

Strategic Release Planning Challenges for Global

Information Systems – A Position Paper

Gabriele Zorn-Pauli

, Barbara Paech

and Jens Wittkopf

University of Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 326, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany

zorn-pauli, paech @informatik.uni-heidelberg.de

Roche Diagnostics GmbH, Sandhofer Strasse 116, 68305 Mannheim, Germany

Abstract. In global companies there is a shift from local to global in-

formation systems that need to satisfy the needs of many diﬀerent di-

visions all over the world. This raises particular problems for strategic

release planning, as the succession of releases needs to satisfy multiple

business strategies of several countries. Identiﬁcation of large-scale busi-

ness aspect similarities, and thus synergies between these strategies, is a

strong contributor to success. Features are a common way to represent

early requirements or requirement bundles during strategic release plan-

ning. Planning global features requires a particular process regarding

capturing and selection validation. The goal of this paper is to present

challenges for strategic release planning of global information systems

gathered from an industrial company in the health care domain. A pre-

liminary literature review investigates to what extent these challenges

are already recognized or solved in academia.

Keywords: strategic release planning, product roadmapping, long-term

feature selection, global information systems

Introduction

The development of information systems (IS) for global companies is changing

from locally towards globally oriented customer-speciﬁc development, which is

reﬂected by the transition from locally to globally used IS. Globally used IS

(abbreviated to global IS in the following) means that due to the globalization

of companies, products, and markets the IS needs to satisfy country speciﬁc

needs of a geographically distributed company. The diﬀerent company country

sites follow to some extent the same global company strategy, but in addition

apply for diﬀerent business strategies depending on country speciﬁc settings such

as markets, competitors, or regulatory aspects.

Therefore, the integration of multiple business strategies into one global IS

imposes major challenges for strategic release planning (SRP). Furthermore,

SRP of global IS aims at ﬁnding the largest common overlap of multiple busi-

ness strategies comprising an optimal set of features regarding costs and available

resources. For that, important decisions are necessary: Which features are useful

Strategic Release Planning Challenges For Global Information Systems - A Position Paper