Abstract
Engineering management principles are important in orchestrating business with technology. With open standards and common community goals, technology can be better aligned to business objectives through more robust, easy to use, and integrated development frameworks. The tools are being integrated into comprehensive frameworks to better align with business requirements. I developed a framework to advance the practice of engineering management as a discipline, encouraging theory development for managing organizations with high information technology content. This dissertation presents that framework, Process Activity Flow Framework (PAFF)(c), which uses requirements management, business modeling, and an integrated development environment in a step by step process. There are three major objectives in this dissertation. First, is to introduce the framework, the Process Activity Flow Framework (PAFF)(c), to be adopted to help connect business and technology domains. Second, is to establish an entry to the framework that created a suitable base and foundation. Requirements management tooling is the foundation. Third, is to show evidence that the requirements management tooling showed demonstrable evidence of change and preferably improvement. The research contributions for the dissertation entail important outcomes and benefits of requirements management tooling. I will describe the outcomes of disciplined requirements management tooling. Then, I will describe our research scenario, characteristics, and assumptions. The research approach will be described from the data collection to the analysis of the results. Study findings include evidence of concordance of attributes across different characteristics in regard to two different samples, a vendor and a customer population sample. The study was able to create a foundation to base the other components of the framework. The findings are important to help guide the community in orchestrating and integrating the landscape of business and technology so that we maximize our efforts in achieving our desired goals and strategies in business. The dissertation conclusions, recommendations and areas of further research are presented and discussed. The results of the survey showed that there are significant differences between the perceptions of vendors and customers. However, both groups gave favorable responses to the use of requirements management tools.