Information requirements and alternatives in Information System design

摘要

The front end of all modern business Information Systems (IS) development methodologies includes an information requirement analysis step. It is shown that this step should be expanded to explicitly consider organizational components external to the computer as subject to change and hence design. This design problem is related to the alternative ways in which users' tasks may be performed and hence to the alternative coordination schemes and organizational structures a business may have. Furthermore, it is shown that the study of these alternatives and the specification of information requirements for each of them should be jointly made if a cost-effective system is to be assured. The explicit consideration of alternative organizational structures in IS opens the way to the use of organization theories to provide a sound basis for design. In particular, theory-derived criteria for joint organization-information structure generation are presented. Other consequences derived from this approach to IS design are that the focus on evaluation changes from efficiency to effectiveness improvement and that political problems are more likely to be foreseen and action taken to facilitate implementation. A case is used to illustrate the practical use of results presented.