Representations in Human–Computer Systems Development

When system developers design a computer system (or other information artefact), they must inevitably make judgements as to how to abstract the domain and how to represent this abstraction in their designs. Over the years human–computer interaction, or more generally information systems design, has had a history of developing competing methods and models for both the process and products of its development. Various paradigms have been suggested, often trying to keep pace with the changing nature of the design problem; from batch processing to interactive systems to work situations and most recently to designing for household environments. It appears timely, then, to review the nature of the design problem that faces the developers of human–computer systems and to consider some of the impact that different representations and different conceptualisations may have on their activities. Green (1998) has suggested that a single model of developing human–computer systems is not desirable, instead arguing for a number of limited theories each of which provides a useful perspective. The aim of this paper is to place competing methods side by side in order to see their strengths and weaknesses more clearly. The central tenet of the paper is that different views of both the human–computer system design process and the different abstractions, or models, that are produced during the design process have varying degrees of utility for designers. It is unlikely that any single method or modelling approach will be optimal in all circumstances. Designers need to be aware of the range of views that exist and of the impact that taking a particular approach may have on the design solution.     

Information Systems Curricula Evaluated by a Method Engineering Framework

Method engineering (ME) deals with the selection and assembly of situation-specific methods for information systems development. In this paper we use ME with a somewhat unusual perspective, that is, an educational one. We introduce a procedure for the evaluation of information systems curricula within an ME framework. Using this approach it is possible to quantitatively characterise and compare information systems curricula, showing their relative strengths and weaknesses. As an example we evaluate three model curricula (IS’90, IS’97 and ISCC’99) and analyse their differences and similarities.     

Requirements Determination: An Information Systems Specialist Perspective of Process Quality

An empirical study was performed to identify, elucidate and judge factors that affect the quality of the information requirements determination process. These quality factors were determined using a series of nominal group processes involving information systems specialists from various organisations and projects. The results indicate that there exists a set of factors that IS specialists from different organisations and with different systems experience agree upon as being critical to ensuring the quality of the requirements determination process, and that these factors appear to fall into six categories: IS specialist factors, user factors, project team factors, project factors, application factors and environmental/organisational factors.     

Negotiating and Understanding Information Systems Requirements: The Use of Set Diagrams

A major contributor to the failure of information technology-based systems is the problem of understanding user or customer requirements in the initial analysis and requirements identification stage of development. This paper identifies and describes an approach to help overcome some of these problems, particularly the mismatch or understanding gap between the customer and the developer. The approach is intended to be used at the early stages of requirement determination and introduces techniques from operational research into the process. In particular set theory and Venn diagrams are used as a way of graphically representing the relationships and gaps in understanding that may exist. The benefit obtained from the use of the technique is partly in the graphical representations themselves but mainly in the dialogue and negotiation that result from the construction of the diagrams. The technique has been developed in a research study of retail organisations’ use of information technology in the UK and an example case study from the sector is used to illustrate and discuss the technique.     

There’s More to Information Systems Development than Structured Approaches: Information Requirements Analysis as a Socially Mediated Process

Information systems (IS) development approaches are considered with particular reference to those aspects of the process most concerned with the determination of information requirements. The majority can be classified as adopting a unitary, objective perspective. This perspective fails to recognise the interpretative, inter-subjective nature of information and the importance of informal as well as formal data-processing systems. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion on socio-technical and soft approaches to IS development by providing a contrasting perspective on information requirements analysis as a process which is socially mediated. A framework is developed which places information requirements analysis in the context of strategic IS development. This locates social communication networks centrally in this process and raises implications for the practice of IS development, and of information requirements analysis.     

Specifications in Context: Stakeholders, Systems and Modelling of Conflict

This paper looks from an ethnographic viewpoint at the case of two information systems in a multinational engineering consultancy. It proposes using the rich findings from ethnographic analysis during requirements discovery. The paper shows how context – organisational and social – can be taken into account during an information system development process. Socio-technical approaches are holistic in nature and provide opportunities to produce information systems utilising social science insights, computer science technical competence and psychological approaches. These approaches provide fact-finding methods that are appropriate to system participants’ and organisational stakeholders’ needs.  The paper recommends a method of modelling that results in a computerised information system data model that reflects the conflicting and competing data and multiple perspectives of participants and stakeholders, and that improves interactivity and conflict management.     

Socio-Technical and Soft Approaches to Information Requirements Elicitation in the Post-Methodology Era

The contributors to this special issue focus on socio-technical and soft approaches to information requirements elicitation and systems development. They represent a growing body of research and practice in this field. This review presents an overview and analysis of the salient themes within the papers encompassing their common underlying framework, the methodologies and tools and techniques presented, the organisational situations in which they are deployed and the issues they seek to address. It will be argued in the review that the contributions to this special edition exemplify the ‘post-methodological era’ and the ‘contingency approaches’ from which it is formed.     

Patterns Approach to Product Information Systems Engineering

This paper deals with the application of the pattern approach to product information systems (PIS) engineering. Two kind of patterns are distinguished: business patterns used for specification and providing solutions for application field problems, and software patterns used for implementation and providing solutions for technical problems (software). Particular attention is given to identifying and specifying different business patterns. The main focus is on the activity of design for reuse, i.e. discovery of business patterns and their integration in a pattern catalogue. The first step consisted of a field analysis providing a common terminology and a semantic of the principal concepts managed in PIS and proposing various models to fix these concepts. It forms a basis for exploring the problems frequently occurring during PIS specification. A pattern catalogue is then proposed to solve the identified problems.     

Human Values and the Management of Technological Change

This paper looks at how human values influence the reception of technology in organisations. It suggests that we need to know what values are and how value systems evolve in order to manage technological change effectively. This proposition is based on research into the issues surrounding performance measurement as part of an information system, the cognition of which contains many parallels with that of technology. The analysis places human values’ theory within the context of systems thinking, where values are taken as system components, their groupings as systems and the expectations and behaviour produced by them as emergence.     

Modelling Off-the-Shelf Information Systems Requirements: An Ontological Approach

Requirements for choosing off-the-shelf information systems (OISR) differ from requirements for development of new information systems in that they do not necessarily provide complete specifications, thus allowing flexibility in matching an existing IS to the stated needs. We present a framework for OISR conceptual models that consists of four essential elements: business processes, business rules, information objects and required system services. We formalise the definitions of these concepts based on an ontological model. The ontology-based OISR model provides a framework to evaluate modelling languages on how appropriate they are for OISR requirements specifications. The evaluation framework is applied to the Object-Process Methodology, and its results are compared with a similar evaluation of ARIS. This comparison demonstrates the effectiveness of the ontological framework for evaluating modelling tools on how well they can guide selection, implementation and integration of purchased software packages.     

Context-aware Retrieval: Exploring a New Environment for Information Retrieval and Information Filtering

The opportunities for context-aware computing are fast expanding. Computing systems can be made aware of their environment by monitoring attributes such as their current location, the current time, the weather, or nearby equipment and users. Context-aware computing often involves retrieval of information: it introduces a new aspect to technologies for information delivery; currently these technologies are based mainly on contemporary approaches to information retrieval and information filtering. In this paper, we consider how the closely related, but distinct, topics of information retrieval and information filtering relate to context-aware retrieval. Our thesis is that context-aware retrieval is as yet a sparsely researched and sparsely understood area, and we aim in this paper to make a start towards remedying this.     

Requirements Engineering, Soft Systems Methodology and Workforce Empowerment

The fidelity and practicality of using soft systems methodology (SSM) to empower the workforce such that its members can make a fuller contribution to the requirements engineering process is critically analysed. The detailed analysis is carried out by using a (critical) philosophical approach to develop an interpretation of (some key aspects of) requirements engineering practice in actual information systems development situations, utilising a number of practical requirements engineering studies. This analysis is built upon to explain the relationship between requirements engineering, SSM and workforce empowerment. It is concluded that, by maintaining critically focused attention on the economic context, it is theoretically possible to engineer requirements for information systems that would actually empower the workforce. However, the likelihood of using SSM successfully for this purpose is low, as the economic context in which requirements engineering takes place is largely ignored by the SSM advocates.     

The Use of a Formalised Risk Model in NHS Information System Development

Information systems (IS) and technology are used extensively throughout the National Health Service (NHS), and the 1998 national information strategy, ‘Information for Health’, sets out how the NHS will be developing and implementing IS to support patient care within the next decade. This new IS initiative is set against a mixed record of success of IS projects in the NHS, with a number of high-profile failures. This paper highlights the need to consider the ‘organisational issues’ involved in systems implementation to avoid failures. It goes on to advocate the use of a process-oriented and organisation studies-based model for risk analysis and management for use in NHS IS projects. Two famous NHS case studies are used to validate the model. It is concluded that there is a real need in the NHS for tools to better control the inherent risks involved in IS development and implementation. Ultimately, the success of IS projects in the NHS is crucial if they want to best utilise clinical and patient information, with the overall aim of improving the efficiency and standard of the nation’s health care.     

Human Factors in the Design of Supervisory Control Systems and Human–Machine Interfaces for Highly Automated Complex Systems

The design of control systems and human–machine interfaces in the field of complex and safety-critical environments remains today an open issue, in spite of the high technological evolution of the last decades. The increasing use of automation has improved efficiency, safety and ease of operations but, at the same time, it has complicated operators’ situation awareness and has changed the nature of their possible errors. The research activity described in this paper is an attempt to develop a methodological framework to support designers of control systems and human–machine interfaces. In particular, it focuses on the need for a deeply recursive approach related to the implementation of the systemic and human aspects of the design process of a human–machine system, intended as a Joint Cognitive System. A validating case study has been performed, based on the full application of the framework on the control of the turbine/alternator system of a thermoelectric power plant in northern Italy. Correspondence and offprint requests to: M. Piccini, Politecnico di Torino Dipartimento di Energetica, C.so Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Turin, Italy. Tel.: +39 011 564 4413; Fax: +39 011 564 4499; Email: mipiccin@polito.it     

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR): The REBUS Approach

Many organisations undertake business process re-engineering (BPR) projects in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Although this approach can result in significant improvements and benefits, there are high risks associated with radical changes of business processes and the failure rate of BPR projects is reported to be as high as 70%. The Centre for Re-engineering Business Processes (REBUS) was established at Brunel University to provide a multidisciplinary environment for research into BPR and its success factors. This paper describes the REBUS approach to research concerning the success of BPR projects and presents examples of some of the projects carried out.     

Exploring Context-aware Information Push

Despite much interest over recent years in the area of context-aware computing, there are still a number of significant gaps in our understanding of the HCI issues associated with such systems. One particular issue that remains relatively unexplored is how to design around the apparently conflicting goals of adapting to changes in context while at the same time adhering to the principle of predictability. In this paper, we describe our exploration into this issue through two alternative designs of an interactive context-aware tourist guide. One original design was based around information pull, i.e. the emphasis is on the user to decide when context-aware information is presented. Our second design incorporates the notion of information push whereby the actual presentation of context-aware information is triggered by contextual events, e.g. changes in the user’s location or changes to the opening times of attractions. Through the evaluation of these alternative designs we hope to gain a better understanding of the usability implications relating to push vs. pull in both this specific domain and in interactive context-aware systems in general.     

Information and Communication Technologies: Perspectives and their Impact on Society

The most fundamental changes of information exchange and communication in society today have been caused by the fast and thorough penetration of all facets of life through networked computers and mobile phones, which will both soon merge with our traditional TV. In this report, these developments will be discussed on four different levels: individuals, groups, organisations and networks. Furthermore contradictory developmental patterns are considered: global versus regional development, entrepreneurship on different scales, data availability versus data security, reality versus virtuality, education, and the ethics of multimedia and the Internet.     

Information and Communication Technologies,Organisations and Skills: Convergence and Persistence

This article, first of all, supports the idea that the undeniable process of ICT-based technological convergence implies the social, cultural and business unification of the world of media and culture. The poor performance of the megamerger is a clear indicator of the unstable ground of the convergence hypothesis. Secondly, it argues in favour of cooperation between different expertise, skills and cultures to make multimedia products or to supply multimedia services, instead of creating from scratch a brand new class of hybrid skills and professions. Thirdly, a variety of new possible and realistically achievable professional profiles in cultural industries and institutions are illustrated. Eventually a set of public policies, in the light of a new role for cities and regions, is developed. Correspondence and offprint requests to: Francesco Garibaldo, Fondazione ‘Istituto Per il Lavoro (IPL)’, via Marconi 8, 40122 Bologna, Italy. Email: f.garibaldo@ipielle.emr.it     

Healthcare Modelling through Role Activity Diagrams for Process-Based Information Systems Development

The aim of this paper is to introduce the socio-technical Role Activity Diagram modelling language to National Health Service (NHS) information systems requirements engineering using a process approach. Most requirements engineering in the NHS is done using data-driven methods such as data flow diagrams. Role Activity Diagrams provide not only a socio-technical method for analysing a particular systems development problem, but they also offer a process-based approach for capturing workflows and their associated information flows, and facilitate communication between analysts and users in an intuitive fashion. In particular, they elicit the important roles in a process and the interaction and collaboration required to achieve the goals of the process. The process approach has been applied in business information systems development. It is introduced here as a potential for systems development in the NHS.     

A Context/Communication Information Agent

We are developing a Context/Communication Information Agent (CIA), an autonomous software agent that proactively searches for the right information at the right time. Our goal is to design and evaluate a system that leverages what people naturally do, using this knowledge to retrieve information, and presenting it with a minimal cost of disruption to the users. In this paper, we describe the results a low-fidelity prototype performed in a meeting situation, the design space for such an application, and our plans for continued investigation.