Development of the ibm.com Interactive Solution Marketplace (ISM): A systems engineering case study

IBM's ibm.com business unit contracted with IBM Global Services (IGS), another business unit of IBM, to develop their Interactive Solution Marketplace (ISM) application. ISM is a single point of entry on the ibm.com website for browsing and searching for a suite of solutions as opposed to individual software and hardware items. The first release of ISM experienced schedule and release content challenges. Development of the second release of ISM (ISM 2.0) became one of the first projects where IBM Global Services implemented their formal Systems Engineering and Architecture (SE&A) process. During the SE&A process implementation, particular emphasis was placed on requirements analysis and management, and on structured and scored reviews. This technical paper presents this implementation and the results in the form of a systems engineering case study. Implementation of the SE&A process during the development of ISM 2.0 was successful. ISM 2.0 was delivered on schedule, at 5% below projected cost, and it constituted the functionality and features expected and desired by stakeholders. Consensus on core stakeholder requirements was achieved early during project development, and the technical reviews allowed the team to identify and resolve key issues before proceeding into subsequent phases. This discipline, along with the expenditure of resources to develop quality requirements, greatly reduced project rework. As such, only one-tenth of anticipated defects were actually found and reported during testing. The quality of the deployed application was further validated by the minimal number of post-launch defects reported.