Designing flexible business information system for modern-day business requirement changes

In today's competitive business environment, business requirements often experience changes at a rapid pace. Coping with requirements changes has long been recognized to be a major problem. The challenge is how to make business information systems flexible so that they can support not only current requirements but also a range of future ones. This paper presents a number of techniques to introduce such desirable built-in flexibility to information system designs. As an illustration, the techniques are applied to the design of a product catalog database with multi-language support.