Trust requirements in e-business

The article presents a conceptual framework for understanding needs and concerns of different stakeholders. The preliminary framework presented here is intended to be used in structuring early phases of requirements elicitation and documentation in e-business system development projects. It includes a number of different views on origins of trust requirements and the context in which they must be defined, each of which may be used as a thinking tool, or checklist, to help break down the complexity of the problem. It argues that parts of the framework may also be useful in structuring the elicitation and specification of other kinds of requirements for e-business. It is argued that a significant focus on such a new understanding of trust and dependability requirements is well-justified in the situation where businesses depend for their survival on the reliability of their e-business support systems. Despite its roots in work on trust and dependability, such a framework will in the future be useful in identifying and structuring other types of requirements for new e-business systems.