Contemporary Trends in Systems Development

This essay seeks to practise a non-linear non-scientific Performance of knowledge and/as ideas. In doing so it challenges the linearity of much that is accorded traditional “research” Status and highlights the enculturisation of knowledge from the perspectives of a dominant masculinist tradition.

The first section of this paper will summarize an ongoing action research project currently being undertaken by the author and a team of academics based at the University of the West of England (UWE, Bristol) spanning nearly a decade. This research project has developed an approach to embedding the tools and techniques of systems engineering in an action research framework (Bakehouse et al., 1995, 1997; Doyle, 1994; Waters et al., 1994). These projects have involved strategic, tactical and operational systems in transport (Lex Transfleet), health care (Frenchay Health Trust, Neurosciences) construction (Trafalgar House, WPE Homes), banking (Citibank), and other areas of the private sector. The theories, tools, techniques and methods adopted for the research program were selected on the basis of their relevance to the solution of real problems discovered in everyday working environments. The initial phases established a methodology that identifies, quantifies, and classifies information problems. The author progressed the research by developing a taxonomy of phenotypes of erroneous action that classified the “causes” of the information problems in terms of Human error.

Fellow Crispians and latent Crispians. We have all seen that many books and papers in conferences, though purporting to be about computerised information systems development, actually read as if ISD is an exercise in the sociological analysis of the business for which the information system is being developed. It is as if, instead of providing computing solutions to very real business problems, the system developer is expected to treat the business as a sick child with little understanding of what is good for it. Or perhaps to treat the business as a mind that is psychologically sick. It needs professional help to be psychoanalysed to be brought to the understanding that it doesn’t really want to carry on behaving in the way it has, and needs to be brought to sanity and healthy living.

As Loucopoulos and Karakostas argue, “Information systems are entering a new phase, moving beyond the traditional automation of routine organizational processes and towards the assisting of critical tactical and strategic enterprise processes. Development of such systems needs to concentrate on organizational aspects, delivering systems that are closer to the culture of organizations and the wishes of individuals.” (Loucopoulos and Karakostas, 1995, p. 4). Clearly, such demands are difficult to achieve in practice. Partly for this reason there has been a considerable growth of interest in IS methodology over the past 10 years or so. Also, unsurprisingly, there has been a steady growth in interest in softer methodological approaches—more attuned to the social needs of the organisation than the technical aspects of IS development. One result of the growth of interest in (and use of) methodologies has led to a new set of problems for IS practitioners; two of which will be considered herein. Let us call the first problem the problem of methodological rigour. Simply stated, this problem concerns the degree to which an IS practitioner needs to adhere to the prescriptions of the chosen methodology, i.e. should he/she use a cookbook or a toolkit approach. Academically, it is worth qualifying this problem somewhat, as different methodologies—indeed different versions of the same methodology—have tended to give different prescriptions in (precisely) this respect. Fidler and Rogerson neatly capture this notion with the phrase, “The rule prescriptiveness of the methodology” (Fidler and Rogerson, 1996, p. 269). It will be argued below that, regardless of the rule prescriptiveness of the methodology, the extent to which an IS practitioner follows the precise prescriptions of a (highly rule-prescriptive) methodology remains a matter of choice for the IS practitioner.

Many medium and large enterprises would like to implement information technology to improve management. They are looking for Integrated Information Systems (IIS) that could meet all the user’s needs and requirements. This kind of systems is operating in the wide areas of logistics, finance and human resource. The co-ordination of logistic and finance activities must be realized in a real time. It is necessary to implement and join the traditional transactional business with electronic business (mySAP.com), using mechanisms of Internet (Marketplace), Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Effective Consumer Response methodology (ECR). Therefore, standard functionality of IIS system must be wide open and easy to develop. To reconfigure the standard procedures or add a new one, the system should offer development workbench with 4GL programming tools (like ABAP for SAP R/3).

An enterprise, in our context, means any organization which is involved in a sort of activity, manufacturing and/or information processing.

The majority of web-based electronic commerce applications to date have concentrated on consumer to business connections primarily concerned with getting information or placing orders. There is now a growing area more concerned with setting up business processes within and between enterprises using Internet technologies (Kalakota and Robinson, 1999) for processes such as supply chain management, client relationship management or selling chain management. Such processes are characterized in a number of ways. First of all there are the traditional transaction based applications primarily based on EDI that serve to support predefined transactions. There is now also a trend to what are commonly known as knowledge intensive processes whose goal is to use the collective knowledge of the enterprise to develop new products and services (Riggins, 1998) that can give the enterprise competitive advantage. Such processes usually require the capture and combination of both tacit and explicit knowledge from a number of specialized areas (Grant, 1996). In many processes knowledge creation most often results in new documents that pass through a process designed to capture and structure tacit and explicit knowledge. A typical empirical innovation process defined by Kuczmarski (1997). Knowledge intensive processes do not necessarily produce physical objects but can be reports, procedures, plans, proposals and responses to proposals. Within public enterprises these include requirements to devise new ways of working to provide new services at ever-lower costs, which in turn call for ways to bring expert knowledge together to formulate plans or new processes.

The Object Oriented software development methodologies that are currently in use assume that all software components are to be developed from scratch. Software solutions providers and software consulting houses have always had a strong business interest in utilizing made to a pattern (standard) software products instead of developing software solutions from scratch. Rapid (and low risk) customization of their products has been their ultimate goal.

Object-oriented modeling techniques may be used for modeling an automated information system, as well as for modeling the environment (the organization) using that system (D’Souza and Wills, 1999). You may even integrate the model of the system with the model of the environment. Where (and how) do you, however, draw the boundary between the environment and the computerised system? In a majority of the published models, the boundary is drawn through the message-symbols depicting the communication between objects in the environment and objects within the computerised system, implying that the interface of the system is identical with the aggregation of the interfaces of all the interface objects. This way of thinking is reinforced by the actor stereotype of UML (see for example (Eriksson and Penker, 1998) or (Jacobson, Booch, and Rumbaugh, 1999)), which implies the notion that some objects are definitely outside the systems, others inside. The paradigm has been inherited from the good old Dataflow context diagrams of the Structured Analysis and Design Methods (deMarco, 1978; Constantine and Yourdon, 1979) where a sole process in the middle serves the interests of the external entities connected by dataflows to that process.

Software development strives toward increasing the amount and quality of the software and at the same time decreasing the costs and development time. One approach to achieve these diverse goals is the systematic software reuse (Biggerstaff and Richter, 1987). In the reuse-oriented software development the key success factor is domain analysis (DA) (Arango, 1989; Lam and McDermid, 1997; Prieto-Díaz, 1994). DA is a process through which information used in software development is identified, captured, and organized with the purpose of making it reusable when creating new systems (Prieto-Díaz, 1990). While the traditional development methods (e.g., Jaaksi et al.,1999; Jacobson et al., 1999) focus on one application, DA focuses on classes of applications (Arango, 1994).

Based on ATM technology, the multimedia service network has been extended, and the request for the multimedia mobile telecommunication services has been extended. As a result, the wireless ATM has been developed by extending the broadband communication network to the wireless area. The current communication network is growing by having the cellular mobile telephone, the wireless packet data network, and the wireless LAN that are based on the voice and low speed data service. As a result of development for this wireless communication network, the request for the wireless multimedia service is expected to be extended. The main objective of wireless ATM is to provide ATM communication network service by providing the data transmission rate of 155 Mbps in the wireless area by using the high frequency band such as 5 GHz, 17 GHz, and 60 GHz.1

The entity of the real world cannot be observed in various aspects since it can be described in the fixed aspect according to the view point of the model constitutor in most of the models including the object oriented model. So, it has a disadvantage (Martin and Odell, 1992; Jacobson, 1992) that it cannot describe the detailed phase structure. In order to overcome this disadvantage, we proposed the Farmer model (Park et al., 1999; Park and Baik1, 2000; Park and Baik2, 2000) that analyzes the entity of the real world in the aspects (Zeigler, 1984) of the various points which are not the fixed aspect. After that, the aspect elements that have completed the analysis are defined to be the aspect objects. The Farmer model is theoretical model, by which we can analyze the real world systementities into several multiple aspects and design them by using the concept of entity node, aspect entity node, uniformity entity node, uniformity aspect entity node and multiplicity abstraction.

The language XML being designed and developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, 1998) belongs today to the most discussed and cited themes among IS/IT people. The WWW users understand the language XML as a new standard for data representation and its exchange. XML data is generated by applications and it can be consumed by applications. It is not too hard to imagine that many information sources will offer a form of external viewing their content as a repository of XML data independently on its inner implementation. A remarkable trend is the increasingly data-oriented role that XML is being asked to assume because of developments in e-business and e-commerce.

This paper describes the technique for business processes modeling. It has been developed at the Department of Information Technologies of the Prague University of Economics on the basis (and as a part) of the Methodology for Analyzing Business Processes (see Repa V. (1998) and Repa V. (1999)).

To adequately perform their duties, bank lending officers, financial analysts, and auditors must accurately assess companies’ financial performance. Stockholders also have a financial incentive to monitor companies’ financial performance. Accurately predicting financial distress is an important part of the assessment and monitoring process. For decades, these individuals used traditional statistical techniques such as regression analysis, logit regression (LR) models, or discriminant analysis to try to predict which companies are likely to be healthy and which ones will go bankrupt. In the last several years, one can observe a growing interest in the use of relatively new data mining tools such as artificial neural networks (NNs) for the tasks of prediction, classification, and clustering.

Increased competitive pressures and a volatile business environment are forcing “high-tech” companies to adopt new working practices and organisational structures. Inter-organisational collaboration is increasingly becoming the accepted way to respond to rapidly changing market opportunities. These collaborations allow companies to quickly acquire new skills and resources required to enable it to exploit market opportunities. The alliance between Netscape, Sun Microsystems and Oracle to challenge the market dominance of Microsoft is an example of this new form of inter-organisational collaboration. In this case, none of the companies individually had the resources, skills and time to develop products that could effectively challenge the market dominance of Microsoft. However by collaborating, the companies had the resources, skills and time to develop new competitive products.

There is a need to assist managers in systems development, especially with information politics, so that we have fewer project failures (Davenport, 1992) and more business solutions. The manager must understand the relationship between project structure, and its political implications, with managerial controls and hence cost of development (Strassmann, 1995). By gaining an understanding of the dynamics between these elements, managers can make more informed choices in decisions that impact the systems development process.

Information systems (IS) developers are facing the task of building and maintaining systems that manage organizational knowledge and memory. However, since there is no clear understanding of what constitutes organizational knowledge and memory, or how it is used, the task at hand is extremely difficult. The purpose of this paper is to assist IS developers by providing a set of recommendations for building and maintaining Knowledge Management/Organizational Memory Systems (KMS/OMS). These recommendations are based on an intensive analysis of an OMS and an action research study that reported the construction of a KMS.

For the last 15 years, in an attempt to successfully face the competition, organisations have been carrying out quality management initiatives such as Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). A key aspect of quality management is business performance assessment and process re-design. Traditionally, the overall performance of an organisation has been associated with its financial performance. In the last decade however, there has been an increasing criticism of the traditional financial management driven approaches to business performance control (Olve et al. 1999). Financial measures show the effects of actions and decisions based on past market conditions that may in the mean time have changed. Therefore financial measurements fail to provide adequate guidance for long term planning because they may be based on assumptions and figures which are no longer valid. It is now recognised that running a company can hardly be reduced to optimising monetary profits. In fact, the need for more comprehensive evaluation of business performance has led to the development of new techniques such as the Balanced Scorecard (BS) (Kaplan and Norton, 1992,1993, 1996). Since 1992, BS has been widely applied in business management. The BS concept is based on three dimensions in time: yesterday, today and tomorrow; actions taken today for tomorrow may have no noticeable financial effects until the day after tomorrow (Olve et al. 1999). The company focus therefore must be broadened so that it keeps a continuous watch on non-financial performance indicators in addition to the financial ones.

Driven by the incentives of cost-efficiency and competition, business has placed more of its critical information asset into automated systems and networks (Hughes, 1997). As a result, business has become more dependent upon the uninterrupted function of information systems. The interruption of business due to the loss or denial of the information assets required for normal operations can have a catastrophic impact on a firm’s bottom line (Glennen, 1997). Such disasters may involve the loss of integrity or reliability in a critical dataset or in the means by which data is transported, manipulated, or presented for use.

Knowledge management has captured the headlines of management literature. However, confusion still abounds as to how exactly this concept should be interpreted in terms of individual organizations. Some organizations recognize the strategic value of their intellectual assets, and view knowledge management as a way of protecting and capitalizing on these resources. For them knowledge management programs offer a strategic focus for a fundamental change in working practices. Some organizations may see knowledge management as a vehicle to instill teamwork and a collegiate working practice among their employees, with the objective for each employee to fulfil their potential. Other organizations regard knowledge management as an approach towards the efficient use of information and communication technology, using electronic networks to channel and record communication and work flows. For some organizations, however, knowledge management serves merely as a new rhetoric, another dawn, promising better, more effective ways of working.

Investments in information systems have reached threshold levels that have triggered senior management reactions centred on determining the associated contributions and payoffs. Assessment of information systems value is needed in order to evaluate decisions regarding new technology investment, outsourcing and reorganisation. Evaluating investments in information technology (IT) poses a number of problems that investing in the traditional assets does not present. The focus shifts from measuring hard and quantifiable dollar benefits that will appear on the firm’s income statement to measuring indirect, diffuse, qualitative and contingent impacts that are difficult to quantify well. But the traditional financial investment evaluation methods of net present value and discounted cash flow analysis require numbers. Brynjolfsson observed that business transformation literature highlights how difficult and perhaps inappropriate it would be to try to translate the benefits of IT usage into quantifiable productivity measures of output (1993). The inability to conclusively demonstrate any linkage between the investment in IT and a wide variety of performance measures leaves the central problem of whether information system (IS) really does make a difference to an organization’s performance unanswered. The willingness of industry to continue its investments in the technology suggests that it is convinced that its investment will be profitable.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are information systems that use an integrated database to support typical businesses processes within functional areas and consistent across areas (Alter, 1999). They are considered as natural winners for many organizations since they bring important benefits, such as corporate-wide data integration, improved tracking of business data, and Y2K compliance. ERP systems, currently sold by large software vendors such as SAP, Baan, Peoplesoft and Oracle, try to create an integrated data base that spans the major activities in a company. ERP packages are in most cases composed of modules that can be chosen and implemented independently, depending on organizations’ needs. Some of the most common modules are: sales and distribution, materials management, production and planning, finance and controlling.

The emergence and commercialization of the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular spurs the creation of electronic allocation mechanisms. Initially, traditional market structures which have developed together with and throughout mankind may serve as a perfect example and framework for electronic business models, as users tend to intuitively understand them (Brandtweiner and Scharl, 1999). Electronic catalogs represent the first step in this direction. During the past few years, companies have put their product catalogs on the Web, in order to make them universally available. Similar to their paper-based counterparts, most electronic catalogs comprise fixed offers in form of static list prices. Search engines and virtual catalogs (Keller, 1997) make it easy for the customer to compare these offers. Bargainfinder has been one of the first experiences with this new kind of competition (http://bf.cstar.ac.com/bf/). Suddenly, strong brands have become commoditized. Especially standardized goods like CD’s, gas, phone carriers, and even established credit card issuers have to find new ways for pricing their goods. Many experts see product and price differentiation as a solution (Varian, 1996). However, sellers still have to set an “optimal” price based on an expected demand curve for a certain good. This is never a trivial task. Therefore, several research projects try to achieve automated negotiation and matchmaking between buyers and sellers on a marketplace, in order to fix prices and conditions of a deal dynamically, based on market conditions.

To say that Information Technologies (IT) are transforming business organisation is trite: it is evident that the “Information Revolution” is changing our economy. But to understand what this transformation entails for professional groups such as financial specialists is less obvious.

Many different problems with meeting processes are largely discussed in the literature, e.g. poor planning, conflict, hidden agendas or groupthink (e.g. Buttler, 1996; Nunamaker et al., 1997). Considering the meeting life cycle (Bostrom et al., 1993; Clawson et al., 1995), the focus of discussion is typically placed in the pre-meeting preparation and in-meeting management. Regarding the post-meeting phase, emphasis is generally placed in the subject of meeting evaluation.

Decision supports systems have been researched since the early 1970’s. The architecture of DSS has been heavily shaped and influenced by Sprague and Carlson (1982) and Keen and Scott Morton (1978). Sprague and Carlson’s roles in building the DSS architecture have been in the areas of studying data, dialogue, and model components of a decision support system (also known as the data-dialogue-model (DDM) paradigm). Meanwhile, Keen and Scott Morton have laid the foundation for the study of various issues in designing, implementing, and evaluating decision support systems from an organizational perspective.

Workflow management is a topic with both academic and commercial interests. Estimates state that there are more than 250 workflow management systems (WfMSs) (Cichocki et al., 1998). Nowadays, many of these systems make use of the Internet. Most producers of commercial WfMSs do not publish the underlying workflow and execution model. The systems have a proprietary nature.

The ultimate target of all marketing efforts should be the customer. There are many possible ways to satisfy the needs of target customers. A product can have many different features and quality levels. The package can be of various sizes, colors, or materials. The brand name and warranty can be changed. Various advertising media as well as a company’s own sales force or other sales specialists can be used. Different prices can be charged, with or without special discounts. With so many possible variables, there is a way to help organize all these decisions and simplify the selection of marketing mixes. It is useful to reduce all the variables in the marketing mix to four basic components—so called four Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

The extraordinary increase in internet access and the growth of internet purchases in countries such as Australia over the last five years would suggest a significant culture shift is occurring at the grassroots level in communications, information access and purchasing practices. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, at August 1999 home Internet access had increased by 27% in the 12 months previous to August 1999, with nearly 23% of all Australian households (1.6 million) being online. Further, an estimated 5.6 million adults—or 41% of Australia’s total adult population—accessed the Internet at some time between August 1998 and August 1999. The survey also indicated an increase in internet-based e-commerce transactions, with nearly 5% of Australian adults (652,000) using the Internet to purchase or order goods or services for their own private use in the 12 months to August 1999 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1999).

Information systems (IS) organizations may be constraining their behavior by viewing software maintenance as a separate process from software development. Existing research and practice views software maintenance as an expense incurred after development that should be contained through better development methodologies, better evaluation of system characteristics, better enforcement of programming standards; and more participation of users during initial systems development (Kemerer and Slaughter, 1997; Banker et al., 1993; Dekleva, 1992a). The implication of this research is that if we did it right the first time, there would be no need to continue enhancing software.

In order to compete in today’s global marketplace, corporations require employees to learn new skills and construct new knowledge quickly and continuously (Hesselbein, 1997; Meister, 1998). A growing number of learners are taking distributed learning into use. In 1998, 710.000 students were enrolled in distributed learning courses in the USA (Moe et al., 1999). General courses produced for large groups of learners do not necessarily meet the need of the individual learner in the context of a professional organisation. Providing general content in a multicultural and professional organisation might prove difficult when the actual need for knowledge is specific for the job or the individual learner.

The pace of change in IS technologies is accelerating. A corresponding trend, lack of qualified personnel to effectively exploit these technologies in meaningful ways for new business models, is also visible. There are increasing demands on the academia to prepare for and offer courses that will educate students in these technologies. XML—Extensible Markup Language—is one such technology (W3C, 1998). It is a facilitating technology (XMLCom, 2000; Microsoft, 1999) that promises, for the first time, add semantic content and meaning to data that survives transmission through the internet jungle. Several earlier technologies feed into describing and understanding XML, including object-orientation, web publishing, and data management (Spencer, 1990). Teaching a course in XML, therefore, requires a choice of perspective and emphasis to ensure that a coherent view of the evolving component technologies is presented to the students.

For a Systems Analyst educator, the following question may include most of the main educational issues:

What factors are most effective in creating a learning environment where students can learn to become Systems Analysts (SA) with knowledge, attitudes and identity that enable them to develop high quality Information Systems?

This is a very wide question. In this paper we want to narrow it down by concentrating on one aspect of an answer:

What learning environments will provide opportunities for the Systems Analysis students to develop a reflective attitude and become aware of their own formative context?

Even this is a very ambitious question to answer. We are looking for fragments to an answer. In this paper we discuss the theoretical background for a project course where we have applied some of the principles we discuss. We describe the components of the course, resources used and some initial impressions of the learning environments.