Strategic Release Planning Challenges For Global Information Systems

or necessary for most of the company sites and should become a standard func-

tionality in the global IS? Which of them concern only locally driven needs and

should be handled separately?

Accordingly, global companies need a standardized global IS that still pro-

vides the possibility of locally driven customizations. Therefore, a corresponding

SRP process for global IS is required.

The motivation for companies to shift from local to global IS is primarily

based on organizational aspects such as eﬃciency enhancement and improvement

of support. Global IS support (1) global usage of applications, (2) elimination of

inconsistent data resulting from redundant systems, e.g. when several systems in

diﬀerent countries support the same processes and (3) interoperability of business

across diﬀerent business segments and countries by cross application and global

master data management.

Within this paper we present challenges for strategic release planning of

global IS gathered from an industrial company in the health care domain.

This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides background information

regarding strategic release planning, Section 3 describes the industrial context

and the identiﬁed challenges. Section 4 discusses related work and Section 5

concludes the paper.

Strategic Release Planning

SRP, also called product or release roadmapping [7] aims at long-term feature

assignment to subsequent releases fulﬁlling technical, resource, risk and budget

constraints. In contrast, operational release planning focuses only on the devel-

opment of the next software release [11]. The output of the SRP process is a

roadmap document that comprises the future planned features for the software

product and is used for communication and risk or budget estimations. Features

represent the information technology (IT) view of high-level business require-

ments derived from business topics. Due to the long-term planning of SRP the

business needs are not speciﬁed in detail and therefore the feature speciﬁcations

either. As a result, SRP has to cope with two crucial issues: (a) fuzzy feature

speciﬁcations, where implementation risks and eﬀort are diﬃcult to estimate

and (b) continuous re-planning needs, because of the persistent requests of the

customer for new features or the revision of existing ones.

Strategic Release Planning Challenges in Industry

In this section the diﬃculties for SRP of global IS in the context of a speciﬁc

company are explored.

3.1

Global SRP in the Health Care Domain: An Example Company

The company under consideration is active in the health care domain operating

globally in 56 countries. Its global IS is developed by an in-house IT department

Strategic Release Planning Challenges For Global Information Systems - A Position Paper Page 2