Kilcourse contended that a lack of communication between users and developers is the primary reason for the problem. "IT people don't sit around designing things nobody wants because they are dumb or they are focused on malfeasance," he said.

Indeed, Carey Schwaber, an analyst at Forrester Research, maintains that developer misunderstandings of user requirements are the leading cause of defects in software. Compounding the problem, she added, is the emergence of globally distributed development and government regulations, like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the U.S., that require users to prove that their IT systems meet business requirements.

The Internal Revenue Service has been plagued with requirements management problems since it began to replace its tax administration and financial systems seven years ago, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

According to the report, released in March, cost overruns and delays have plagued the US$1.9 billion IRS project. The report blamed inadequate development and management of requirements, among other things.

As the problems mounted early on in the project, the IRS in October 2004 created the Requirements Management Office. However, the office doesn't expect to have final requirements management policies and procedures in place until March 2007, the report said.

No more mind reading

Debra Jensen, vice president of system development at Jack in the Box, said the restaurant chain is currently evaluating requirements management tools as part of an initiative to overhaul the process of collecting requirements from users.

That effort began about a year ago, when the company started using internally built templates to collect user requirements. The process now demands that users formally certify that finished applications meet their needs.

The Jack in the Box IT requirements management overhaul was initiated because in the past, "there [was] a sense that IT should just know the business needs and write the requirements for [users]," Jensen said.

The need to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has been used by IT to further persuade users to embrace the templates. "We said the auditors were going to be looking for these requirements in writing," Jensen said.

With the first phase of the new process in place and accepted by users, Jensen said, Jack in the Box's IT department is starting to work under the philosophy that if business users don't have time to define requirements, "we don't have the time to implement them."

Further down the line, Jensen said, the company plans to buy a business process engineering tool that will be integrated with the requirements management product it chooses. Such an integration promises to create a system that can automatically capture the various requirements associated with specific business processes, such as order processing, she added.

The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board in Toronto, which manages Ontario's workplace safety initiatives and provides disability benefits, recently purchased IBM Rational's Portfolio Manager tool to better align the requirements management process with the rest of the development life cycle.

Vitalie Temnenco, an architect in the organization, said the board plans to integrate the Rational tool with the SteelTrace Catalyze requirements management tool from Compuware, which the agency already uses. IT developers will use a Catalyze adapter to integrate the tools.

Temnenco wouldn't speculate on when the integration project will start but did note that the board is planning to train its developers, business architects and requirements analysts to use the integrated tool set.

"If we feed all the requirements information into the portfolio management tool, we'll be able to provide for a quick turnaround of project data," he said. "Ideally, we would reach a new real-time process."