The Unspoken Requirements - Eliciting Tacit Knowledge as Building Blocks for Knowledge Management Systems

This conceptual paper sheds light on how analysts deal with the issue of unspoken or unconscious requirements that users might have with regards to Knowledge Management Systems (KMS). Current approaches to requirements elicitation of KMS tend to concentrate mainly on technical aspects, but they ignore human and social influences. How do analysts recognize requirements that users don’t or can’t tell them about? What approaches have been used and are there (if any) methods that have specifically been developed to identify such requirements? Are KM researchers and practitioners in the area of requirements elicitation aware of the ongoing research in the social and behavioural fields? The paper sheds light on how to improve the way analysts currently obtain requirements from stakeholders. These proposed Knowledge Management – Requirement Elicitation (KMRE) framework is a resource to elicit requirements regarding the human context of a system using a set of analytical techniques and knowledge from Activity Theory and Co-creation. The framework enables collaborative work between requirements engineers, who gather these inputs in the form of software requirements, social practitioners, who provide the knowledge and processes underlying these tools, and the stakeholders, who know the domain and intended application of the projects.