Teaching an Ethnographic Approach to Requirements Elicitation in an Enterprise Architecture Course

Requirements elicitation is an important part of information systems development. It is often performed as a technical task, but from a close look it is mainly a social activity. The main work consists of interacting with stake-holders in order to understand their work practices and how these would change with the introduction of a new IT system. Engineers are often not trained in the necessary social skills. Most elicitation techniques focus on the technical issues rather than the social issues. In this paper we describe a trans-disciplinary col-laboration in which students of social sciences help to explain the ethnographic approach to Master’s students in an Enterprise Architecture course taught in an engineering school.