What happens before requirements engineering?

At the Children's Services Planning Group, our task is to find a way of integrating all the various specialist agencies that provide support for children with problems or special needs, so that children and their families see us operating as a team, working together with the best interest of the child at heart, instead of the old way of doing things in which each agency operated within the narrow confines of its own professionalism. The trouble is, we don't really know how to do this. We have many years' experience of not talking to each other or sharing budgets, and changing this does not come easily. An information system might help us to overcome our communication difficulties, but we don't know what sort of system we want or how we will be able to make sense of it so that it will help us in our task of supporting an integrated service delivery that crosses organisational and professional boundaries. There are three major problems that we are beginning to solve. The first is ontological heterogeneity: different services have different constructions of 'the child' and it is only just becoming clear how it can be determined whether the various constructions are compatible. The second is ethical conflict: different professions have differing ethical codes, and these codes are incompatible. The third is epistemological uncertainty: we are only beginning to find out what the structure of the problem space might be, let alone knowing how to design what might constitute a solution. Even thinking of the situation in terms of a problem/solution dichotomy is unhelpful, and may well be deconstructive. None of these is a new problem of course, but their combination is such as to make the design of the research plan itself a research task.