Simple "Feedback" service

At our organization, I keep observing a recurring struggle to gather requirements and design public facing products. I mean, for example, when development teams are tasked to design systems that are targeted for students, all the requirements come from deans (supposedly 'product managers') without any kind of usability study and feedback from real users e.g. students. Also, the growing amount of 'phantom use cases' is being pushed into public facing products by our internal IT management without any real analysis of what the actual users would want and how they would actually use the system in question (or so it seems to me).

I was just discussing with my colleagues the fact that it would really be beneficial to gather feedback about systems from our student users, analyze it and then derive use cases from it for future product developments. IMO, that would really be more useful than simply coming up with those 'phantom requirements' ourselves.

To realize that, I'm thinking of creating a simple generic "Feedback" web application/service that would contain a 'rating', 'feedback/suggestions/comments' that users can submit. This should be a generic service that could gather feedback/reviews/ratings from students and/or internal corporate users for any systems, etc. (think Amazon reviews). And once we have all the data, we would be able to do all kinds of "collective intelligence' (data mining) analysis with it which would hopefully help us improve our products and make our product development more 'user-centric' instead of 'corporate-centric'.

I'm planning using Grails for the first prototype.

Later...