Working IT out in e-Science: experiences of requirements capture in a HealthGrid project

This paper reports on our experiences of being involved in requirements capture for a HealthGrid project. Large scale, collaborative projects with multiple partners tend to experience numerous problems in the requirements capture phase (and often beyond) and HealthGrid projects are no exception. Projects with highly innovative objectives often have additional sets of problematics, however. In carving out new visions of, for example, clinical research and healthcare service delivery, HealthGrid projects have to reckon with--and work within--existing healthcare policy, legislative frameworks, professional cultures and organisational politics as well as the more common integration problem of dealing with legacy systems. Such factors are not conducive to the achievement in healthcare of the e-Science vision of seamless integration of information and collaborative working across administrative, professional and organisational boundaries. In this paper, we document some of the challenges we encountered in investigating the requirements for eDiaMoND, a flagship pilot UK e-Science project. We discuss what we might learn from these challenges, especially approaches to requirements capture that are appropriate for projects with innovative aims and are also sensitive to representing and addressing what may be complex professional and organisational interests.