Analyzing IS User Requirements using Organizational Semiotics

In recent years, lack of appropriate understanding of IS user requirements, has been one of the most important causes of IS development failure. Therefore, many methods were introduced for better analyzing user requirements; some of them were philosophically different. Organizational semiotics (OS) is one of these methods, which with phenomenological and action-oriented view, tries to get better system requirement analysis. In this research, first, organizational semiotics and SSADM was compared, with focus on their ability to elicit and analyze IS user requirements, and then, OS was applied in analyzing an IS requirement analysis case. Research findings show that OS in many dimensions is superior to SSADM; although SSADM has superiority in few dimensions too. Therefore using OS can help analyzing IS user requirements more appropriately.