The Co-Design of Business-Process & IT Systems
We celebrate designers who produce especially elegant or usable artifacts as if they were possessed of supernatural powers. Yet design should be easy. It is the application of “best practice” principles to a specific situation. We can observe how the users of a designed artifact or system work, then design the artifact or system accordingly. Why does that approach fail so often?
The co-design of business & IT systems is like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle without the picture. You get an edge here and there, part of a building outline, or a connecting feature, but mainly you are assembling bits and pieces that are tacked together in whatever way makes sense at the time. Most IT analysts fudge this by merging stakeholder requirements for change under a single, vague business goal. But this doesn’t prevent the shift in focus between multiple objectives that stakeholders prioritize, as these become salient to the current area of design. Change analysts have to understand multiple business domains, as stakeholders’ requirements indicate different types of solution and the analyst attempts to integrate these around a coherent business vision. Even business managers don’t really understand their processes – and know very little of the processes with which their area of responsibility interfaces. Conflicts, priorities, and omissions in change objectives are seldom realized as the logical analysis methods used for IT requirements don’t provide ways to map out the full scope of change – the big picture.
Goal-emergence in Design
My research in this area has revealed that design is not the planned, carefully managed process that technocentric project management approaches would lead us to expect. Because design is collaborative and interactive, it proceeds through a series of punctuated equilibrium episodes, where collaborative framing of the situation shapes the solution. Until a critical mass of cognitive dissonance on the part of design participants and stakeholders causes a breakdown in the collaborative agreement (equilibrium) and forces collaborators to complicate their collective framing of the situation. Which, in turn, complicates and redefines the designed solution.
Very few design goals are understood to the point that they can just be stated and agreed across stakeholders. Design-goals are constantly changing between iterations, as shown in Figure 1. The designer starts by designing for the subset of goals they understand. As they explore and test the design with users, they become aware of new requirements and so modify the subset of goals they are designing for. As part of this process, they also discard any requirements that are no longer associated with perceived user needs. This leads to a complex “parabola of design” as goals evolve with a better understanding. But external stakeholders only see the perceived path of design, shown in the diagram above. So the most frequent comment on design is “what took you so long?”
Figure 1. Goal-emergence in design
Boundary-spanning design involves collaboration across organizational domains. Organizational change processes and the design of information systems are situated in wicked problems that confound the definition of requirements for change. The reconciliation of multiple perspectives on “the problem” and the coordination of disparate requirements that are often related to different perspectives require an approach to distributed sensemaking that treats the target system as emergent and involving a distribution of design labor.
Related Publications
Gasson, S. (2006) ‘A Genealogical Study of Boundary-Spanning IS Design’, European Journal of Information Systems, Special issue on Action in Language, Organizations and Information Systems. 15 (1), pp. 1-16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000594
Gasson, S. (2021) “Managing Boundary-Spanning Cognition Through Emergent Problem-Framing in Enterprise Systems Design” Hawaii Intl. Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-51), Jan. 5-8, 2021. Organizational Systems and Technology (OST), Advances In Design Science Research minitrack.
Gasson, S. (2008) ‘Goal-Framing and Breakdowns in the Design of Boundary-Spanning Information Systems,’ in: Third Int. Conf. on Design Science Research in Info. Systems and Technology, May 7-9, 2008. Atlanta GA
Gasson, S. (2007) ‘ Progress And Breakdowns In Early Requirements Definition For Boundary-Spanning Information Systems’ in S. Rivard & J. Webster (Eds.) Proceedings of International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS ’07), Montréal, Québec, Canada Dec. 9-12, 2007