Steven Alter, Making work system principles visible and usable in systems analysis and design, 10th AMCIS, 2004, pp 1604-1611
Abstract
With the increasing integration between information systems and the work systems they support, methods that focus on computerized aspects of information systems but skim over the work system are increasingly inadequate. To address work system issues, systems analysis and design methods should apply general principles that help in assessing likely positive and negative impacts of conceivable changes in the information system and/or work system. Such principles apply to the operation of systems in organizations, not to processes for analyzing systems. This paper presents a set of work system principles and gives initial examples illustrating how EMBA students have applied those principles within preliminary analyses of real world systems in business organizations. The principles come from a variety of sources including the sociotechnical literature, TQM, and comments about previous sets of principles. Future research will attempt to improve the set of principles through additional literature searches and through feedback from users.
Steven Alter, The work system method for understanding information systems and information system research, Communications of the AIS, 9(6), Sept 2002
Abstract
The work system method is a broadly applicable set of ideas that use the concept of “work system” as the focal point for understanding, analyzing, and improving systems in organizations, whether or not IT is involved. The premises underlying this method may be controversial in the IS community because they imply that the traditional jargon and concerns of IS practitioners and researchers address only part of the issues that should be covered and may discourage focusing on other core issues related to successful projects and systems.
The work system method includes both a static view of a current (or proposed) system in operation and a dynamic view of how a system evolves over time through planned change and unplanned adaptations. The static view is based on the “work system framework,” which identifies the basic elements for understanding and evaluating a work system. This framework is prescriptive enough to be useful in describing the system being studied, identifying problems and opportunities, describing possible changes, and tracing the likely impacts as those changes propagate to other parts of the system. The dynamic view is based on the “work system life cycle model,” which shows how a work system may evolve through multiple iterations of four phases. The static and dynamic views are used together in a principle-based systems analysis method that treats the information system as part of the work system until a final step when it distinguishes between work system changes that do and do not involve the information system.
A summary is available.