Further down the line, Jensen said, the company plans to buy a business process engineering tool that will be integrated with the requirements management product it chooses. Such an integration promises to create a system that can automatically capture the various requirements associated with specific business processes, such as order proc-essing, she added.

The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board in Toronto, which manages Ontario's workplace safety initiatives and provides disability benefits, recently purchased IBM Rational's Portfolio Manager tool to better align the requirements management process with the rest of the development life cycle.

Vitalie Temnenco, an architect in the organization, said the board plans to integrate the Rational tool with the SteelTrace Catalyze requirements management tool from Detroit-based Compuware Corp., which the agency already uses. IT developers will use a Catalyze adapter to integrate the tools.

Temnenco wouldn't speculate on when the integration project will start but did note that the board is planning to train its developers, business architects and requirements analysts to use the integrated tool set.

"If we feed all the requirements information into the portfolio management tool, we'll be able to provide for a quick turnaround of project data," he said. "Ideally, we would reach a new real-time process."