Three companies formed a business alliance to support the clearing of trades in the energy market. Two of these companies offered experience in the energy market, the other in clearing securities.

Before any product development was initiated, the three companies needed to investigate the risks, profitability, and feasibility to support this business alliance. Each of the three companies provided their own knowledge expert who were at different geographic locations. None of the companies had a skilled requirements engineer who was able to develop clear and detailed requirement specifications relevant to all three companies.

SBDi was called on to provide their expertise in requirements engineering for such a challenging project. The third-party perspective and experience in working with individuals at all levels of a company was greatly beneficial to such large-scale projects.

SBDi provided a process and built a deliverable that enabled senior executives to identify the risks, profitability, and feasibility of the product within six short months! The resulting blueprint was the mortar that ties Information Technology to the business.

When SBDi assumed the lead role of Requirements Architect, the result was a detailed blueprint for this alliance. This blueprint clearly defined the business and its associated systems and software; which illustrated the impact Information Technology had on the business as a whole. The Requirement Specification contained such great detail that it could be handed over to any technical architect to design and implement. It was organized in a fashion that all vendors opting to design and build the product reviewed the document commented that this was the best requirement specification they had ever seen!

In addition, SBDi trained the clients' Requirements Engineers so that they are now able to develop a customizable framework to identify all the details necessary to building other quality products in the future.

More detail on these SBDi case studies is described in the forthcoming book: A Requirements Pattern, Succeeding in the Internet Economy.