Context: Regulations, such as the European Accessibility Act (EAA), impact the engineering of software products and services. Assessing and managing that impact effectively while providing meaningful inputs to development teams is one of the emerging requirements engineering challenges.

Problem: Enterprises conduct Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) to consider the effects of regulations on software products offered and formulate requirements at an enterprise level. Despite its practical relevance, we are not aware of any studies on this large-scale regulatory requirements engineering process.

Methodology: To better understand companies’ practices and challenges, we conducted an exploratory interview study of RIA in three international enterprises. We focused on how they conduct RIA, emphasizing cross-functional interactions, and using the EAA as an example.

Results: We found out that RIA, as a regulatory requirements engineering process, is conducted to address the needs of executive management and central functions. RIA involves coordination between different functions and levels of enterprise hierarchy. Such coordination is knowledge-intensive. Enterprises use artifacts to support interpretation and communication of the results of RIA. Challenges to RIA are mainly related to the effectiveness of executing such coordination and managing corresponding knowledge.

Conclusion: In practice, RIA in large enterprises demands close coordination of multiple stakeholders and roles at different levels of the enterprise hierarchy. Applying interpretation and compliance artifacts is one approach to support such coordination. However, there are no established practices for creating and managing such artifacts.