Is It Time to Re-Evaluate the Connection Between Bounded Rationality and Requirements Elicitation?
Tuure Tuunanen · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2006
Bounded rationality has been a corner stone of understanding how organizations work. This view has heavily influenced information systems development discipline as well and end-users have been thought to know what they want from information systems. This has led to rather mechanistic approaches in use and development of requirements elicitation techniques. Lately, more and more information systems have been targeted to consumers, such as 3rd generation mobile phone applications. The change from user to consumer may also alter the rationality behind decisions. Therefore, the applicability of bounded rationality to might reconsideration. We conducted a literature review and focused to recognize how the concept of end-user has evolved in requirements elicitation in relation to the theory of bounded rationality. We found that it is evident that bounded rationality has had an effect on development of requirements engineering techniques. However, we also found that the alternative way of trying to understand how to seduce end-users has gained ground recently. As a conclusion we present that when developing a system for consumers we should reconsider whether to use the bounded rationality as an only basis for understanding end-users’ needs. Moreover, we should look towards marketing science and consumer behavior literature to better understand the rationalities behind consumer decision making.