In order to improve customer satisfaction and reduce systems development cycle time, engineering organizations must enhance their requirements capture and management capabilities. This means using formally specified and prioritized user requirements to drive technical development and supplying management with the information needed to make and implement decisions. Most system development processes define their inputs and outputs in the form of documents, instead of the essential data consumed

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... generated. These documents tend to weave together user and system requirements with architecture and design concepts which result in an unstructured set of information. To remedy this situation, an information structure has been developed, that will hold the essential data needed to support system development. This paper describes the motivation, components, and implementation of a requirements and decision management information structure, which includes requirements, decisions, rationale, and other key marketing, management, and engineering information, to support systems engineering improvement efforts.