Redirigiendo al acceso original de articulo en 19 segundos...
ARTÍCULO
TITULO

A Comparison of Five Alternative Approaches to Information Systems Development

Rudy Hirschheim    
Juhani livari    
Heinz Klein    

Resumen

The field of information systems (IS) has grown dramatically over the past three decades. Recent trends have transformed the IS landscape. These trends include: the evolution of implementation technology from centralized mainframe environments towards distributed client-server architectures, embracing the internet and intranets; changes in user interface technology from character-based to graphical user interfaces, multimedia, and the World Wide Web; changes in applications from transaction processing systems towards systems supporting collaborative work; and the use of information technology as an enabler of business process reengineering and redesign. These technology changes coupled with changes in organizations and their operating environment, such as the growth of the network and virtual organization, internationalization and globalization of many organizations, intensified global competition, changes in values such as customer orientation (service quality) and Quality of Working Life, have imposed new demands on the development of information systems. These changes have led to an increasing discussion about information systems development (ISO), and in particular, the various methods, tools, methodologies, and approaches for ISD. We believe such discussion has opened the door for new, alternative IS development approaches and methodologies.Our paper takes up this theme by describing five alternative ISD approaches, namely the Interactionist approach, the Speech Act-based approach, Soft Systems Methodology, the Trade Unionist approach, and the Professional Work Practices approach. Despite the fact that most of these approaches have a history of over 15 years, their relevance to IS development is not well recognized in the mainstream of IS practice and research, nor is their institutional status comparable to traditional approaches such as structured analysis and design methods. Therefore we characterize the five approaches as 'alternative' in the sense of alternative to the orthodoxy.The selection of the five approaches is essentially based on the finding that research on ISD approaches and methodologies has been dominated by a single set of philosophical assumptions regarding the nature of the phenomena studied and what constitutes valid knowledge about those phenomena (Hirschheim and Klein, 1989; Orlikowski and Baroudi, 1991; and livari, 1991). The idea behind the selection of the five ISD approaches has been to include approaches which challenge the dominant assumptions. These alternative approaches typically build upon radically different conceptions of the goals, meaning, function and processes of ISD. Part of the rationale for our paper is to meet the need of a concise yet penetrating way of introducing alternative ways of system development to a wider audience. The way in which the approaches are introduced, highlights their underlying principles and features. This naturally leads to a critical examination of their strengths and weaknesses. From this angle the paper adds more detail to the earlier work on mapping the terrain of the complex literature on IS development (cf. Episkopou and Wood-Harper, 1986; Hirschheim and Klein, 1989; livari, 1991; Orlikowski and Baroudi, 1991; Baskerville, etal. 1992; Avison et al. 1992; Avgerou and Cornford, 1993; Fitzgerald, 1994; Hirschheim, Klein and Lyytinen 1995; Avison and Fitzgerald, 1995; Jayartna and Fitzgerald, 1996; Wynekoop and Russo, 1997; livari, Hirschheim and Klein 1997).The paper can be expected to be of interest to the IS community in three respects. Firstly, the five alternative approaches are likely not to be as widely known as they deserve to be. The following meets the need of a concise introduction to them. Secondly, the paper continues our earlier work on mapping the terrain of the complex literature on IS development (Hirschheim and Klein, 1989; livari, 1991; Hirschheim and Klein, 1992; Hirschheim, Klein and Lyytinen 1995, 1996; livari, Hirschheim and Klein, 1997). Thirdly, it is our contention that the five alternative approaches point the direction which some important IS research will likely take in the future to strengthen the interpretive and critical traditions (Orlikowski and Baroudi, 1991; Hirschheim and Klein, 1994) within the field.

 Artículos similares

       
 
Hannes Zöschg    
Trash racks installed at hydropower plants cause head losses that reduce energy output. Previous research has thoroughly investigated head losses through both experimental and field studies. However, only a limited number of numerical studies have been p... ver más
Revista: Water

 
Changjing Fu, Yangming Xu and Tianlong Zhao    
One of the major geological hazards that can cause harm to long-distance oil and gas pipelines are water-induced disasters. These disasters are quite common and widespread. Pipelines that cross river channels are at a higher risk of facing damage due to ... ver más
Revista: Water

 
Petr Kadlec    
This paper aims to solve the space robot pathfinding problem, formulated as a multi-objective (MO) optimization problem with a variable number of dimensions (VND). This formulation enables the search and comparison of potential solutions with different m... ver más
Revista: Algorithms

 
Zacharoula Kalogiratou and Theodoros Monovasilis    
Two-Derivative Runge?Kutta methods have been proposed by Chan and Tsai in 2010 and order conditions up to the fifth order are given. In this work, for the first time, we derive order conditions for order six. Simplifying assumptions that reduce the numbe... ver más
Revista: Algorithms

 
Zhengdong Deng, Xiaoli Zhu, Junpeng Duan, Juncheng Ye and Yaoqiang Wang    
This paper presents a novel 13-level switched capacitor multilevel inverter, which uses less devices to achieve six-fold voltage gain. The proposed topology structure consists of twelve transistors, two diodes, and three capacitors. It is worth mentionin... ver más
Revista: Applied Sciences