ISECON 2004 Conference Newport, Rhode Island, USA November 47, 2004

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ISECON 2004 ConferenceNewport, Rhode Island, USA
November 4-7, 2004

• K.H.VAT (Mr)
• Department of Computer and Information Science
• Faculty of Science Technology
• University of Macau, Macau SAR
• China

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Systems Architecting of IS Support for Learning
Organizations The Scenario-Based Design
Challenge in Human Activity Systems

• Motivation
• The Situation of Concern
• The Organizational Context for IS Solution
• The Problem of Designing IS Support
• The Idea of Scenario-Based Development
• Systems Architecting of IS Support for Learning
  Organizations
  
• Challenges for Continuing Development

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Motivation

• Digital Era Organizational activities,
  including learning increasingly being virtualized
  over the Internet, implying the need for renewed
  IS support
• Organization Transformation Enterprises
  including educational institutions seen willingly
  renewed from being mechanistic (linear) to being
  organic (dynamic), in their approach to
  delivering services.

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The Situation of Concern

• The challenge of this knowledge economy is
  organization transformation away from being a
  mindless machine towards being a living
  organism
• Methodology Philosophy - Emergent nature
  conceptual distinction between functional
  requirements and the means for realization in
  practice
• Management practice - The means for reaching a
  goal is continually and routinely evaluated in
  relation to emergent criteria accommodating a
  dynamically changing organizational and
  technological environment
• IS Support for knowledge work should serve as an
  organizing framework by which concepts and goals
  may be formulated, extended, and synthesized.
  

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The Organizational Context for IS Solution

• Places where people continually expand their
  capacity to create the results they truly desire,
  where new and expansive patterns of thinking are
  nurtured, where collective aspiration is set
  free, and where people are continually learning
  how to learn together (Peter Senge The Fifth
  Discipline 1990).
• An organization which focuses on developing and
  using its information and knowledge capabilities
  in order to create higher-value information and
  knowledge, to modify behaviors to reflect new
  knowledge and insights, and to improve
  bottom-line results (David Garvin Building a
  Learning Organization 1993).

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The Problem of Designing IS Support

• Clarifying the Problem
• Identifying Design Moves
• Envisioning the Solution
• Recognizing Trade-offs and Dependencies
• Anticipating Impacts on Human Activity

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The Idea of Scenario-Based Development

• Moving away from working with the idea of an
  obvious problem which required solution
  
• Moving towards the idea of working with a
  situation which some people, for various reasons,
  may regard as in need of solutions.

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Scenario-Based Development SBD (contd)

• Principles
• Understand peoples needs
• Envision new activities and technologies
• Design effective prototypes
• Draw lessons learned from the systems
  prototyped.
  

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The WHY of SBD in the IS Context

• To ensure that the IS environment is aligned with
  the organizational imperatives
  
• To help build an IS environment that is
  extensible and capable of accommodating changes
  
• To communicate appropriate views of the IS
  solution among various stakeholders
  
• To help keep the IS environment intellectually
  manageable

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The WHAT of SBD in the IS Context

• Any system which serves another cannot be modeled
  until a definition and model of the system served
  is available
  
• Appropriate levels of abstraction are installed
  to fulfill the needs of different stakeholders
  
• Models of human activity systems should consist
  of structured sets of verbs which stakeholders
  could in principle directly carry out.
  
• Ideas What services For whom In what ways
  Under what circumstances

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The HOW of SBD in the IS Context

• IS Design as a process of learning through the
  idea of human activity systems (HAS)
  
• Find out about the problem situation that has
  provoked concerns
  
• Select relevant concepts that may be integrated
  into different human activity systems
  
• Create HAS models from the relevant accounts of
  purposeful activity
  
• Use the models to question the real-world
  situation in a comparison phase.
  
• The debate generated should point a way to
  possible improvements of the problem situation.
  
• (Peter Checkland 1999)

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Systems Architecting of IS Support for Learning
Organization

• Start from a careful account of the purposeful
  activity served by the system.
  
• From that, work out what informational support is
  required by people carrying out the activity.
  
• Treat the creation of that support as a
  collaborative effort between technical experts
  and those who truly understand the purposeful
  action served.
• Ensure that both system creation and system use
  are treated as opportunities for continuous
  learning.

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A Model of Knowledge Synthesis

• Basic Model
• Selectively perceive parts of the world
• Attribute meaning to what we perceive
• Make judgment about our perceptions
• Form intentions to take particular actions
• Carry out the actions.
• For
• The personal process
• The social process
• The organizational process

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A HAS Model for Organizational IS Work

• Element 1 people (individual groups)
• Element 2 perceived world
• Element 3 organizational discourse
• Element 4 meaning attributions
• Element 5 assemblies of meanings, intentions,
  and accommodations
  
• Element 6 purposeful action
• Element 7 IS support
• Elements (1-5) process -- organizational context
  where people create meanings and intentions
  
• Element (6) main outcome of the process
  purposeful action
  
• Element (7) a form of support for the process.

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The Hard and Soft Problems of IS Work

• Systems Engineering (hard systems methodology)
  practice
  
• -- at the start of a systems study, it is
  necessary to define the need, the aim to be
  achieved, the system which when engineered, will
  meet the need, the mission to be accomplished
• -- given the definition, the systems approach
  then enables us to select a means of achieving
  the desired end which is presumably efficient
  
• -- the taken-as-given assumption is that the
  world can be taken to be a set of interacting
  systems, some of which do not work very well and
  can be engineered to work better
• -- the issue is goal-oriented How can we
  provide an efficient means to meet the specific
  objective?
  
• Dilemma
• In problems involving purposeful human
  activities, goals are often obscure, and it is
  often not possible to take for granted the
  concept of a problem, and the activity of trying
  to solve it. In fact, there are always many
  possible versions of the system to be engineered
  or improved, and systems boundaries and
  objectives may well be impossible to define.

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Hard Systems Methodology

• The project can be taken to be a set of
  interacting systems, some of which do not work
  well and can be engineered to work better.
  
• The hard approach can be described by
• 1) Define the problem
• 2) Assemble the appropriate techniques
• 3) Use techniques to derive possible solutions
• 4) Select most suitable solution
• 5) Implement the solution

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Soft Systems Methodology

• The project can be taken to be very complex,
  problematical, and mysterious
  
• Our coping with the project, the process of
  inquiry into it, can itself be organized as a
  learning system
  
• The use of the word system is no longer applied
  to the project, but the process of our dealing
  with the project
  
• The soft approach can be described by
• 1) Define the situation that has provoked
  concerns
  
• 2) Express the situation with different sets of
  concerns
  
• 3) Select concepts that may be relevant
• 4) Assemble concepts into an intellectual
  structure, e.g. (HAS)
  
• 5) Use this structure to explore the situation
• 6) Define changes to the situation as the
  problems to be tackled
  
• 7) Implement the change process

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Challenges for Continuing Development

• Sustainable IS development is based on a
  continual innovation of organizational IS support
  created via individual scenarios of human
  activities
• Complete organizational knowledge of human
  activities for knowledge work is hardly created
  only by the IS professionals when individuals
  keep modifying their knowledge through
  interactions with other organizational members
• In examining real-life scenarios characterized by
  purposeful action, we can always think about the
  world in different ways, relate these concepts to
  our experience of the world, and so form
  judgments, which can affect our intentions and
  ultimately design actions
• Always an inquiring process to employ SSM-based
  scenarios to craft the suitable context of IS
  support
  

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Challenges (contd)

• The LUMAS interpretation
• Here a user, U, appreciating a methodology, M,
  as a coherent set of principles, and perceiving a
  problem situation, S, asks himself What can I
  do?
• He then tailors from M a specific approach, A,
  regarded as appropriate for S, and uses it to
  improve the situation. This generates learning,
  L, which may both change U and his appreciations
  of the methodology future versions of all the
  elements LUMAS, may be different as a result of
  each enactment of the process.