Business and IT Co-design & Collaborative Modeling
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When we design a new organization or re-design an existing one we have the unique opportunity to “do it right from the start”, instead of fixing IT problems when it is already too late. This opportunity implies to develop the IT system together with the business processes it supports, i.e. to co-design business and IT. The theoretical foundations for the co-design approach were laid by Olov Forsgren based on systems thinking (Churchman). Co-design has a number of dimensions regarding the role that people and artifacts have in that process. My research so far has shed light on different aspects of this problem. One involves the role of the design language (i.e. an artifact/tool) as a facilitator for the co-design of business and IT models. The fundamental question is: What characterizes a language that can be used successfully by both the business designers and the IT designers in their collaborative effort? From this point of view the design language becomes itself an object of design: How can we build a good modeling language [R06f, R06g]? And a language that is used for co-design must itself be co-designed by the people who are going to use it if we want to facilitate mutual understanding. One approach to achieve this is called language integration [R07a]. Another one makes use of ontologies [R07g]. |
Another aspect of the co-design issue concerns the establishment of a common understanding of the problem among the stakeholders of a co-design project before the actual design can commence. As the stakeholders typically have different backgrounds they will look at the problem from different perspectives and therefore arrive at different conclusions about what the problem actually is. But before we can design a solution we have to agree on the problem. To reach this agreement we need to resort to some common denominator that all stakeholders share. This are of common understanding can lie outside the problem domain and is often closely related to the culture in which the stakeholders have grown up and that provides a common substrate. Establishing a mutual understanding about the problem domain ist then achieved by linking the common domain (source domain or vehicle) to the problem domain (target domain or topic). The instrument for creating that link is called a metaphor. Metaphors are powerful cognitive tools that allow us to explain unknown, complex things in terms of the things that we already know. They are deeply embedded in our knowledge about the world and we use them to make sense of the environment we live in from early childhood on. With their help the task of developing a common understanding of the problem and deriving a suitable design for a solution can be greatly facilitated [R06a, R06b, R05a].
Co-designing business and IT also implies the co-design of business models. Such models are not created in isolation but are rather the result of a collaborative effort involving a number of stakeholders. Collaborative modeling has been widely studied in the literature but we still lack comprehensive method and tool support. I have started to investigate this issue in an empirical study [R07b] where I arrived at the somewhat surprising result that the collaborative modeling process is more a decision-making and negotiation process than a creative one. Building on that research I have developed a tool to support modeling in groups (see http://www.coma.nu). This tool is currently being tested.
[R05a] Rittgen, Peter: Metaphors in Co-Design. In: Soliman, Khalid S. (ed.): Internet and Information Technology in Modern Organizations: Challenges & Answers. Proceedings of the 5th International Business Information Management (IBIMA) Conference, Cairo, Egypt, 13-15 December 2005, IBIMA, Mineola, NY, pp. 363-368
[R06a] Rittgen, Peter: Translating Metaphors into Design Patterns. In Nilsson, Anders G.; Gustas, Remigijus; Wojtkowski, Wita; Wojtkowski, W. Gregory; Wrycza, Stanisław; Zupančič, Jože: Advances in Information Systems Development - Bridging the Gap between Academia and Industry, Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Information Systems Development (ISD'2005), Karlstad, Sweden, August 14-17, 2005, vol. 1 of 2. Springer, Berlin, 2006, pp. 425-436
[R06b] Rittgen, Peter: Users as Subjects in and of Co-design. In Khosrow-Pour, Mehdi (ed.): Emerging Trends and Challenges in Information Technology Management, 2006 Information Resources Management Association International Conference, Washington, DC, USA, May 21-24, 2006. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing, 2006, pp. 459-461
[R06f] Rittgen, Peter: Deriving Concepts for Modeling Business Actions, in Embley, D.W.; Olivé, A.;Ram, S. (Eds.): Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2006), Nov. 6-9, 2006, Tucson, AZ, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4215, Springer, Berlin, 2006, pp. 468-481
[R06g] Rittgen, Peter: Towards a Language for Business Action Theory, in: Action in Language, Organisations and Information Systems ALOIS 2006, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference, Borĺs, Sweden, 1-2 November, 2006, pp. 3-16
[R07a] Rittgen, Peter: Co-designing Models for Enterprises and Information Systems – a Case for Language Integration. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Information Systems Development, 31 August – 2 September 2006, University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary, Springer, Berlin
[R07b] Rittgen, Peter: Negotiating Models, in Krogstie, John; Opdahl, Andreas; Sindre, Guttorm (eds.): Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 19th International Conference, CAiSE 2007, Trondheim, Norway, June 2007, Proceedings, LNCS 4495, Berlin, Germany: Springer, 2007, pp. 561-573
[R07g] Rittgen, Peter: Towards a Meta-model for Socio-Instrumental Pragmatism, in Rittgen, Peter (ed.): Handbook of Ontologies for Business Interaction, Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2007, pp. 87-100