1.6. WHAT IS AN INFORMATION SYSTEM?
Whilst there is a lot of discussion about the nature and construction of information systems, there is relatively little work which discusses the purpose, not of an
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inpidual system but of information systems in general. The work of Stafford Beer (1979) and the cybernetic fraternity has given us a useful way of looking at the role of information systems in organisations. Information is what flows in control loops which are central to the survival of any self regulating system. Although the cybernetic model has its critics it is useful for us to take on a key proposition: that is that the control system needs to contain a model of the system being controlled. It follows that if an organisation’s information system has this control function it must contain or at least be in conversation with a model of the organisation. This is not very different from the idea of van Gigch and
Le Moigne (1990) that the identity of an organisation is held in its memory, and that the information system is the organisational memory.
However, the development of information systems has never seemed to realise their promise, and although to some extent this may reflect over optimistic promotion of "business solutions", there is also reason to believe that there are many problems inherent in the development of such systems.
The literature on the failure of conventional approaches to the development of information systems starts with Ackoff's paper (1967) “Management Misinformation Systems”. Ackoff argues that there are basic misconceptions about information systems that contribute to their lack of success.
Give them more is the view that managers need more information to enable them to make adequate decisions. The counter position is that in fact managers suffer from an information overload and that a minimum set of information should be provided to support the decision process in question. The tendency to provide too much irrelevant information results from a lack of understanding of the problem and the decision process appropriate to its resolution. The growth of large corporate databases has made it easier to provide too much information, although the considerable improvement in quality of user interfaces to database systems may help the decision maker to be more selective in extracting relevant information.
The manager does not need to understand the information system. This view
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ignores the reality of the decision making process. It is usual for a decision maker when faced with information to want to know how it was assembled, and this is particularly true of condensed information which is far removed from the original elementary data. This need to understand the process reflects the need to establish confidence in the information prior to basing a decision on it. The user needs to understand the process at a conceptual level. It is not the intricacies of the database and its associated physical storage but the logical operations in deriving the figures presented which the user needs to understand.
The wider the view of the organisation the better. This position assumes that if managers have access to information about the rest of the organisation, they will be able to take better decisions. Ackoff argued that such information may easily be misinterpreted by someone not involved in its derivation, and may thus have deleterious consequences on the decisions being made. Ackoff was arguing for a very hierarchical approach to management which may in part have its origins in the management culture of the time and the technology of the late sixties. Whilst the danger of misusing information is a real one, the danger of taking decisions based on a myopic view of the current situation is also real. It is likely that current thinking would stress the communication of situation reports between parts of the organisation, so that any decision maker could inform him/herself of the wider context of their current problem. There is a considerable difference between encouraging someone to look at the notes and discussion documents of another and keeping colleagues informed about objective changes and approved policies.
Data makes decisions. This position suggests that information necessarily contributes to improved decision making. Ackoff argued that without understanding the decision process and identifying the appropriate information required by it, it is not automatic that merely providing more (irrelevant) information will aid the making of the decision.
Although written thirty years ago Ackoff's critique is still appropriate today. Madnick in 1995 still considers it relevant to repeat the familiar adage that data richness and information poverty remains with us and this despite the substantial
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growth in power of hardware and usability of software over the last 30 years. The matching of problem domain to information clearly remains a challenge.
1.7. THE THESIS
This author will argue that the heart of the problem lies in the mapping of the detailed data which is generated by the activities of the organisation to the models of the organisation which underpin the decision maker's approach to his/her tasks. It will be argued that this mapping is not well supported by current design methodologies or by current decision support systems and tools for creating them (see figure 1.1). This research makes several contributions to the solution of this problem:
? A review of existing conceptual modelling frameworks and, in particular, the modelling of behaviour, leads to the proposed CORD (Collections, Objects, Roles and Domains) Model.
? A conceptual model which cannot usefully be implemented or exploited is of limited value. The Object Prototyper has been developed which is a tool for managing object models and is the basis for both developing and testing the usability of the CORD model.
? A review of the literature on management reporting and statistical summary tables identifies the essential features of management reports. The literature reflects a confusion between the logical and the presentation issues, so a
conceptual model is developed, the COST (Collections of Objects Summary Tables) model, which separates these two levels of abstraction.
? The COST-table and COST-view models are both defined within the COST framework and a software tool is constructed, COSTed, which enables tables and views to be defined using a wimp interface, as well as the definition
language of the COST model.
These improvements in conceptual modelling, the definition of management
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summaries, and the integration of a management summary into a standard object model, are all major contributions of this thesis.
1.8. TESTING OF THE THESIS
In developing and testing conceptual models it is not appropriate to consider proving something to be true or false ,or even to hope to discover something. The natural focus of the research in this area is that of generating descriptors of a view of a section of the real world, but in accepting that the information system of the organisation is also part of the real world, this language of description also needs to be able to describe the IS. The section of the real world under discussion is that of management information systems. This is much narrower than all computer systems, and the techniques explored and proposed are unlikely to be relevant to command and control systems, or network management systems, or a large number of other applications of computing. The justification for focusing on such a restricted area is its significant economic importance as represented by the number of people employed in it. The other justification is that the interface between technical specialist and non technical users and clients is much more significant in this area than in the specification of a highly technical application.
