1 EXPLORING ANALYST-CLIENT COMMUNICATION: USING GROUNDED THEORY TECHNIQUES TO INVESTIGATE INTERACTION IN INFORMAL REQUIREMENTS GATHERING Cathy Urquhart, Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3052, Australia. email: c.urquhart@dis.unimelb.edu.au Phone: + 61 3 9344 9248 Fax: +61 3 9349 4596 Keywords: Systems Analysis, Requirements Gathering, Grounded Theory, Qualitative Data Analysis, Human Communication Abstract This paper describes a case study in client-analyst interaction during the requirements gathering phase. The focus of this work is a discussion of interactional tactics used by analysts and clients to facilitate shared understanding and agreement, and how this may impact on conceptualisation of information systems. The paper also describes in detail, methodological issues encountered when analysing conversational data, and how these issues were resolved by application of grounded theory techniques allied with other qualitative techniques. Finally, the paper gives some suggestions as to how the findings could assist current practice in systems analysis, particularly with regard to how systems analysts might better structure their interactions. INTRODUCTION The requirements definition phase of an information systems project is of necessity a problematic process, founded as it is on a very unreliable technique - human communication. The oft heard cry of the practitioner - 'users don't know what they want' - contains at least a grain of truth when analyst-client communication can properly be characterised as cross cultural communication, where use of unfamiliar language that is domain specific on both the part of the analyst and the client can create a barrier to communication. Most cross-cultural studies take culture to be shared knowledge of how to behave and recipes for understanding experience in specific ways (Barnett & Kincaid 1983). Viewed from this perspective, it can be seen how users and analysts might be perceived to come from different ‘cultures’. It has also been stated that miscommunication events between cultures are essentially of the same type as intra cultural encounters, and that the problem is perhaps made salient by those differences (Banks, Ge & Baker 1991). Previous research on analysts and clients has found many differences between the two groups in the areas of beliefs, attitudes, personalities and motivations (Pettigrew 1974, Gingras and McClean 1982, Green 1985, Kaiser and Bostrom 1982, Benbasat, Dexter and Manther 1980, Ferret and Short 1986). The issue of communication between client and developer has been identified as a major factor impacting on systems development for two decades, since ineffective communication was found to be negatively correlated with project success (Edstrom 1977). In 1994 the Australian Computer Society devoted a whole issue of its practitioner magazine to the problem of communication with users (Kennedy 1994). In longitudinal