work system method

This paper combines ideas from separate research streams to identify high-level design choices related to the scope and content of enterprise models. It summarizes the work system modeling method (WSMM), an extension of a long research stream related to seeing enterprises as interacting work systems. It applies a recently developed framework for describing theoretical perspectives to articulate numerous aspects of a work system perspective on enterprise modeling (EM). This paper's main contributions include its approach for exploring conceptual or theoretical starting points for enterprise modeling and its expanded view of a work system perspective on enterprise modeling.

This paper responds to a need for a sociotechnical systems (STS) perspective that fits in a world that has changed greatly over the decades since the sociotechnical movement began. After a brief summary of the relevant background, this paper uses the various topics in its title to describe a view of sociotechnical thinking that might be more suitable for today's world.

This paper explores how work system theory (WST) and related core ideas in various versions of the work system method (WSM) overlap with enterprise engineering and with the DEMO methodology. Based on the definition of work system, an enterprise can be viewed as a set of interacting work systems. A work system can be summarized at various levels of detail. The simplest level is basically a verb phrase. The next level is a "work system snapshot." More detailed descriptions are based on a work system metamodel. This paper's contribution is in two areas, 1) establishing links between WST/WSM and enterprise engineering in general and 2) comparing aspects of WST/WSM and DEMO and demonstrating similarities, thereby implying the possibility of converting DEMO models into work system models that can be developed further using other methods and tools designed around WST. Those synergies might support combining theoretical underpinnings of DEMO with the intuitive simplicity of the work system perspective, which has been applied by many hundreds of employed MBA and Executive MBA students who produced management briefings recommending improvements in work systems in their own organizations. The overlap between WST/WSM and DEMO is demonstrated using a DEMO representation of the OMG's EU Rent example [1], which illustrated OMG's Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) [2] and Business Motivation Model (BMM) [3]. A tabular summary called a work system snapshot captures much of a DEMO essential model of the EU Rent example. A more extensive summary based on a work system metamodel adds information for going from construction to implementation. The example illustrates how a work system perspective on a sociotechnical system fits with 7 postulates of an enterprise engineering manifesto [4] and with 7 enterprise engineering fundamentals [5], thereby suggesting the potential value of deeper exploration of those relationships.

This paper proposes that basic ideas from the work system theory (WST) and the work system method (WSM) might serve as a front end to object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD), thereby providing a path from business-oriented descriptions to formal, technical specifications. After describing the background motivation and summarizing work system concepts, the paper uses a hiring system example to show how two tools from WSM can be used as a front end for OOAD, in effect, a step before creating use case diagrams and other types of Unified Modeling Language (UML) artifacts. Potential benefits of this approach stem from a business-oriented question, "how can we improve this work system's performance," rather than an IT-oriented question, "how can we create a technical artifact that will be used?" Work systems theory, Work system method, Object-oriented analysis and design, Use cases, UML artifacts method for IT professionals attempting to produce software that meets requirements produced in collaboration with managers and other business professionals. The creators of UML asserted that any modern object-oriented approach to developing information systems must be (1) use case driven, (2) architecture-centric, and (3) iterative and incremental (Dennis et al, 2009, p. 18). OOAD produces formal specifications that help IT professionals produce well-designed software. Establishing links between WST/WSM and OOAD addresses important problems in requirements determination, a process that is problematic and error-prone due to difficulties in communicating between business-oriented and IT-oriented worldviews. With a business-oriented worldview, the system of concern is a work system in which human participants perform work using information, technologies, and other resources to produce product/services for internal or external customers. This work system focus is directly related to topics that managers and business professionals care about greatly, i.e., how well their work systems perform and how to improve performance. In contrast, specifications for IT-based tools are more distant from both their understanding and their concerns. With an IT-oriented worldview, the system is an IT artifact that is used by users while performing work. Thus, without diminishing the importance of UML specifications for architecture-based software development and maintenance processes, there is no reason to assume that initial collaborations between business and IT professionals should be framed around concepts that drive object-oriented specifications for IT professionals. It is possible that interacting around use case terminology introduces an unnecessary bias because it focuses on uses of technology rather than work system improvement. Ideally, collaboration with business professionals should occur around concepts they understand fully. Subsequent efforts should generate the technical specifications that programmers need. This paper is organized as follows. A background section summarizes the limitations of use case diagrams. The next section presents an overview of WST and WSM, including the definition of work system, the work system framework, work system life cycle model, work system method, and work system metamodel. A hiring system example illustrates two ways to summarize a work system: a work system snapshot based on the work system framework and a more detailed summary based on the work system metamodel. The more detailed summary is called an Activities, Resources, Triggers and Products (ARTP) table as it includes resources used by each activity along with relevant triggers, preconditions, and post-conditions including product/services that are produced. The final sections explain how information in the work system snapshot and ARTP summaries can be converted into use case diagrams and can lead to other UML artifacts such as use case descriptions, domain class diagrams, and activity diagrams.

The work system method was developed iteratively with the overarching goal of helping business professionals understand IT-reliant systems in organizations. It uses general systems concepts selectively, and sometimes implicitly. For example, a work system has a boundary, but its inputs are treated implicitly rather than explicitly. This paper asks whether the further development of the work system method might benefit from integrating general systems concepts more completely. After summarizing aspects of the work system method, it dissects some of the underlying ideas and questions how thoroughly even basic systems concepts are applied. It also asks whether and how additional systems concepts might be incorporated beneficially. The inquiry about how to use additional system ideas is of potential interest to people who study systems in general and information systems in particular because it deals with bridging the gap between highly abstract concepts and practical applications.

This conceptual contribution responds to the invitation to the DIGIT 2015 Call for Papers "to reflect on and move forward from the dominant stream of research work on technology acceptance." The dominant stream of research is basically about antecedents and correlates of adoption and continuation of use for hardware/software artifacts. This paper uses work system theory and several of its extensions to identify directions for adoption research that have been realized partially, but not nearly to the extent possible. It focuses on three general issues: 1) what adoption means in the context of work systems, 2) how adoption occurs, and 3) how adoption entities change after adoption, including decisions by work system participants about whether and how to comply or not comply with prescribed practices that are often taken-for-granted as the result of adoption processes.

This article presents work system theory (WST) as a body of theory for analysis, explanation, prediction, and design and action related to systems in organizations. It provides background about how WST evolved, summarizes major components of WST, and explains that each of the five types of theory identified by Gregor ( ) appears in WST. The discussion of WST emphasizes its overall contribution to knowledge by emphasizing areas in which it differs from commonly used terminology, frameworks, and beliefs within the IS field. In a discipline in which even basic terms such as system, service, implementation, and user have many contradictory meanings, a key goal of WST is to demonstrate the possibility of using an internally consistent set of assumptions, concepts, frameworks, and principles as a basis for analysis, explanation, prediction, and design and action.

Discussion and debate about the meaning of service, service system, IT service, and related to terms has proven inconclusive and frustrating. This preliminary draft provides insights about the nature of the problem and tries to disentangle ideas and expectations related to three portrayals of service. In a nutshell, efforts to understand service as a unitary concept tend to go in circles due to overlapping references to different but overlapping portrayals and contexts. This paper identifies three separate but somewhat overlapping portrayals of service, services as acts, services as outcomes, and services as software entities. Then it introduces a work system perspective on service to explore whether and how the three portrayals of service can be reconciled. This paper proceeds in layers. The first layer introduces three portrayals of service and cites examples to show that one or several of those portrayals is present in most published definitions of service. The second layer introduces the main ideas in work system theory (WST) as a summary of a work system perspective on systems in organizations. The third layer explains how a work system perspective provides a path for seeing the relationship between the three portrayals of service. The fourth layer answers a number of specific questions related to the ideas in the first three layers. This sequence might seem like a long slog, but it ultimately shows that the important point is not an individual definition of service or some other term, but rather a system of concepts that makes sense as a whole and that applies to most practical situations.

This position paper describes an approach that might increase the likelihood that the sociotechnical perspective will take its proper place in today's world. This paper questions the clarity of the traditional STS notion of joint optimization of a social system and technical system. It explains how the integrated system view in work system theory (WST) and the work system method (WSM) might provide a more straightforward way to describe, discuss, and negotiate about sociotechnical systems. Using WST/WSM to bypass the effort of separately describing and jointly optimizing social and technical systems might make it easier to engage effectively in discussions that reconcile system conceptualizations, business realities, and humanist values in IS development.

Recent surveys of information technology management professionals show that understanding business domains in terms of business productivity and cost reduction potential, knowledge of different vertical industry segments and their information requirements, understanding of business processes and client-facing skills are more critical for Information Systems personnel than ever before. In an attempt to restructure the information systems curriculum accordingly, our view is that information systems students need to develop an appreciation for organizational work systems in order to understand the operation and significance of information systems within such work systems. Work systems are systems in which human participants and/or machines perform work to produce products and/or services for internal or external customers. This view stresses that systems in organizations involve more than an IT system (such as a data warehouse or an accounting application). The work system method has been designed to assist in developing an understanding of work systems in organizations. The method describes an adaptable set of steps that an analyst can use to identify a work system, clarify problems, issues, and opportunities related to that work system, identify possible directions for change, and produce and justify a recommendation. To date, the use of the work system method in information systems curricula has demonstrated that postgraduate students can benefit from this approach when examining a business situation involving an information system. To contrast the experiences of post-graduate students with work experiences, in this paper we report on use of a simplified version of the Work System Method in a freshman Information Systems course and study how students without work or technical knowledge performed when analyzing IT-reliant work systems in business settings. We reflect on an introductory information systems course that included a work system analysis assignment, and we examine the reports produced by students as well as the learning outcomes and challenges.

The term service appears in IS in contexts ranging from visible business activities performed for customers through invisible computerized responses to computerized requests deep within IT infrastructures. After distinguishing between rigorous definitions of service and treatment of service as an analytical lens, this paper presents a framework that distinguishes between four lenses for understanding and analyzing services and systems in the IS field. Each lens is directly applicable to many situations, and less applicable elsewhere. This paper summarizes each lens and identifies potential synergies between pairs of lenses. The synergies may help in using secondary lenses to support analyses guided by a primary lens. The range of lenses helps in understanding the range of meanings of service in IS.

The work system method was developed iteratively with the overarching goal of helping business professionals understand IT-reliant systems in organizations. It uses general systems concepts selectively, and sometimes implicitly. For example, a work system has a boundary, but its inputs are treated implicitly rather than explicitly. This article asks whether the further development of the work system method might benefit from integrating general systems concepts more completely. After summarizing aspects of the work system method, it dissects some of the underlying ideas and questions how thoroughly even basic systems concepts are applied. It also asks whether and how additional systems concepts might be incorporated beneficially. The inquiry about how to use additional system ideas is of potential interest to people who study systems in general and information systems in particular because it deals with bridging the gap between highly abstract concepts and practical applications.

Although called systems, information systems in organizations are often viewed as tools that "users" use. IS success is often gauged as though it were about acceptance and usage of a tool. System development is often conceived as building computerized tools that satisfy information requirements of idealized business processes. Frequent IS disappointments and occasional failures are often attributed to inadequate user involvement, and even users involved in the projects often admit difficulty contributing fully to these technical discussions. This paper argues that the current balance between tool thinking and systems thinking in IS practice and research is slanted toward tool thinking, and that the IS discipline has done far too little to exploit the system nature of systems in organizations. Progress in that direction would fully recognize the sociotechnical nature of systems in organizations, thereby encouraging richer systems thinking than is possible in practice or in research when largely social entities and largely technical entities are treated separately. A long-term effort toward richer systems thinking in the IS field is the attempt to develop the work system method, a systems analysis method for business professionals. To date, this effort has generated innovations that may have valuable implications for systems analysis, IS pedagogy, and the development of a body of knowledge for the IS field. Many research issues for the future have also emerged.

The work system method (WSM) is a systems analysis method for thinking about systems in organizations whether or not complete data and technical expertise are available. WSM's goal is to help business professionals understand and communicate about a system at whatever level of detail is appropriate. WSM treats systems as sociotechnical work systems with human participants rather than technical systems with users. It applies a static view of systems, the work system framework, and a dynamic view, the work system life cycle model. It combines those frameworks with conventional problem solving by defining the system in relation to problems and opportunities, drilling down to understand the situation in more detail, and producing a justified recommendation. Over 600 employed MBA and Executive MBA students have used various versions of WSM to produce management briefings including recommendations about IT-reliant work systems in their own organizations. While WSM can stand alone to help business professionals, it also can be used in conjunction with tools and methods from Six Sigma and software development wherever sufficient data can be collected and where technical expertise is available. Keywords: work system method, systems analysis, systems thinking, methods for business professionals Executives, managers, and other business professionals often need to understand and respond to problems and opportunities related to operational systems in their organizations. Such situations call for systems thinking, i.e., thinking about a situation as a system in order to make changes that do more than masking localized symptoms with quick fixes. Ideally, straightforward, easily used methods should be available to help them with that system thinking. Ideal characteristics of such methods differ from the characteristics of methods for technical experts that require formal model building, complex diagramming, statistical expertise, or extensive training in Six Sigma techniques or IT software design techniques. Characteristics of methods for typical business professionals include:  The method should help them organize and explore their own understanding the situation as a step toward being able to communicate and negotiate about problems, opportunities, and possible directions for improvement.  The method should be based on typical business terminology, not abstract concepts that few business professionals can use fluently.  The method should emphasize problems, opportunities and issues (i.e., not just detailed documentation of system and data structure) because a business professional's need to think about systems is usually triggered by problems, opportunities, and issues.  The method should recognize that business professionals often need to evaluate systems and make decisions whether or not potentially important data is actually available. Thus, while it is almost always better to have and use abundant, relevant, and carefully defined data, the method should not require extensive data or new data collection in order to launch a semi-formal analysis.  The method should be usable in any order, implying that it cannot force a particular starting point.

This paper explores linkages between work system theory (WST) and central concerns of the SIGPrag community related to theorizing the IT artifact and its organizational and societal context. The first part of the paper provides background about the development, basic ideas, and underlying premises of WST. In addition to summarizing older facets of WST, it summarizes three new extensions of WST, a service value chain framework for looking at service systems in terms of service concepts, a metamodel (Alter, 2010a) for looking at work systems in more depth than is supported easily by the work system framework, and a concept classification matrix (Alter, 2010e) that can support analysis and design activities and that might provide a way to organize a body of knowledge for the IS field. The second part of the paper returns to the questions about the fit and synergy between WST and the interests of the SIGPrag community. While it is clear that WST fits with central themes in pragmatist IS interests and research, such as usefulness, action, change, and knowledge, the potential synergy between WST and existing research topics in the SIGPrag community is not obvious.

In today's systems development environments, object models are playing an increasingly important role in contributing to the agility and flexibility expected of the information systems being built. While current computer-aided software engineering tools can aid in creating object models, they do not provide much support in ensuring that the object models created are consistent with the specifications in use case narratives. This paper presents a methodology and a knowledge-based system to facilitate the verification of consistency of a given object model against a set of use case narratives. The methodology is implemented as a prototype knowledge-based extension to an open source CASE tool. The prototype's ability to reliably extract relevant information from use case narratives and its role in verifying the consistency of object models have been evaluated using a laboratory experiment. By analyzing use case narratives utilizing natural language processing techniques and applying collaboration patterns and heuristics, this methodology can determine missing and invalid model elements to guide the analyst in creating object models that are consistent with the requirements specified in a set of use case narratives. The results from this design science research indicate that the prototype system can be a useful tool to assist in this process.

Enterprise modeling (EM) applies abstraction in creating simplified representations of complex realities. Unfortunately, both the realities and the task of creating valid conceptual representations bring daunting challenges. Complexity is increasing, e.g. the transition of conventional production towards product-service systems operating in heterogeneous enterprise ecosystems. Simultaneously, modeling methods and tools tend to be formal and inflexible, and often are designed for automated model processing rather than for helping business professionals understand business situations. The result is the current, unsatisfying state of enterprise modeling, in which models can be developed and used directly only by modeling experts and are largely impenetrable to non-experts. This paper presents a set of principles that suggest directions for progress toward genuinely flexible, controllable, and usable enterprise models. The principles accept the relaxation of some expectations about ente...

Enterprise Architecture is the process of translating business vision into strategy. Hence, Enterprise Modeling is the process of translating an organization's strategic intent into mandated socio-technological innovation projects required to reach an agreed future state of the firm's operation. This paper uses four longitudinal case studies at DHL Express Europe to introduce a significant paradigm shift to modeling of the enterprise at the work system level as an abstract representation of the desired future state of the enterprise. This representation specifies in full the business capabilities serving current and future customer needs and the work system configuration enhancements needed to satisfy the customer needs. The associated project has four p steps: 1) Assessment of Status Quo, 2) Agreeing on the desired End-State, 3) Evolution of legacy work-systems, 4) Removal of Obsolete components. This process model explicitly includes the necessity to search for, address and remove all strategic, financial, operational and technical legacy issues identified during the baseline of the status quo. Enterprise Architects should be embedded in each implementation project for Project Assurance purposes in order to monitor the delivery of the agreed end-state.

Audience comments about a debate at ICIS200 [Alter et al., 2001] related to ebusiness and the fundamental concepts of information systems noted that the debate was undercut by the lack of agreement about what are the fundamental concepts. As a follow-on to that debate, this article proposes a set of fundamental concepts for information systems. While there is no bullet-proof way to prove that a particular set of concepts captures what is truly fundamental within a diverse and rapidly evolving field, the attempt to identify these concepts challenges the reader to ask "If this isn't the way to identify fundamental concepts, what is the way to do that? If these aren't the fundamental concepts, what is a better set of fundamental concepts and why?" This article's overarching theme is that the fundamental concepts of information systems are mostly fundamental concepts of work systems in general. The article defines "fundamental concept" and discusses various considerations for identifying them. It then proposes a set of fundamental concepts organized in several layers. The first layer concentrates on the elements needed to summarize a work system. The second layer adds concepts that constitute a general vocabulary for describing, understanding, and evaluating work systems. Each concept in the second layer is related to a specific concept in the first layer. Are the Fundamental Concepts of Information Systems Mostly About Work Systems? by Steven Alter Since an information system is a special case of a work system, every fundamental concept of work systems should at least apply to information systems and might be a fundamental concept of information systems. Similarly for work system projects and information system projects, both of which are also special cases of work systems. The article argues that the fundamental concepts of work systems should be viewed as fundamental concepts for all three special cases and then concludes with a number of questions about that the reader might want to consider concerning the approach the article takes and the particular fundamental concepts that are identified.

This paper presents a metamodel that addresses service system analysis and design based on an operational view of service that traverses and integrates three essential layers: service activities, service systems, and value constellations. The metamodel's service-in-operation perspective and underlying premises diverge from a view of service systems as systems of economic exchange that has appeared a number of times in the journal Service Science. In addition to the metamodel itself, this paper's contributions include an explanation of eight premises on which it is based plus clarifications concerning concepts such as service, service system, customer, product/service, coproduction and cocreation of value, actor role, resources, symmetrical treatment of automated and nonautomated service systems, and the relationship between service-dominant logic and service systems. Many articles have discussed these topics individually; few, if any, have tied them together using an integra...

This paper presents a new, operational view of service activities and service systems in the form of an extension of the resources-for-action (RA) section of an existing service system metamodel. The original metamodel represented the fact that service activities need resources in order to occur and also produce products/services that are resources for subsequent service activities and/or the service system's customers. The new RA section clarifies the different types of resources that are created or used by service activities within service systems. This paper addresses an area of service science that is not well-developed. The literature related to service science tends to treat resources in a general and nonspecific manner that provides relatively little insight about how to identify specific resources that are needed or used in specific service systems. This paper combines ideas from two streams of research, one related to a service system metamodel and the other related to a new tool for systems analysis and design. After summarizing a new extension of the RA section of the service system metamodel, it uses an example related to service activities in a medical clinic to illustrate how the new RA section leads to a tabular documentation, analysis, and design tool. That tool can be used for examining the design or operation of a service system with emphasis on the timely availability of necessary resources.

This paper proposes that basic ideas from the work system theory (WST) and the work system method (WSM) might become a front end to object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD). After describing the background motivation and summarizing work system concepts, it uses a hiring system example to show how two tools from WSM can be used as a front end for OOAD, in effect, a step before creating use case diagrams. Potential benefits of this approach stem from a business-oriented question, "how can we improve this work system's performance, " rather than an IT-oriented question, "how can we create an IT artifact that will be used?"

This paper explores the support for more comprehensive modeling of service systems than that possible through modeling methods developed through partial perspectives, with uncertainties about their wider suitability and need for integration with other methods in this domain. It responds to a Dual Call for Papers from INFORMS Service Science and IEEE Transactions on Service Computing requesting contributions that address the barely explored challenge of establishing links between business views of service systems and more technical views from service computing. Competing definitions of service reveal that most business views of service emphasize acts or outcomes produced for others, whereas a service computing view emphasizes encapsulated functionalities that can be discovered and launched by service consumers. This paper uses work system theory (WST) and a related work system metamodel to represent a business view of service systems. It uses the Unified Service Description Language ...

Interactions between systems are a necessity, a source of opportunity, and a source of difficulty and complication in building, implementing, and maintaining IT-reliant systems in organizations. This paper presents system interaction theory (SINT), a theory for analysis that covers almost all intentional and unintentional interactions between work systems that may be sociotechnical or totally automated. SINT is a broadly applicable theory that encompasses interactions between the types of systems that are central to the IS discipline. To minimize redundancy, this paper summarizes SINT immediately after introducing the research goal and, thereby, provides a context for the many distinctions and references that follow. A discussion of SINT's domain and scope explains why SINT views interacting entities as work systems rather than as tasks, components, or software modules. The literature review positions SINT in relation to topics under headings that range from general systems theory and computer science to human computer interaction and organization science. Topics in SINT include relevant characteristics of systems and system interactions, purposes and/or causes of system interactions, system interaction patterns, direct effects of system interactions, responses to direct effects, and outcomes related to system interactions. The paper discusses a variety of potential contributions to theory, practice, and research.

The main goal of the Enterprise Systems and Business Process Capability Workshop at ECIS 2011 is to discuss ways to achieve greater business value from ERP. This paper explains how various aspects of work system theory (WST) can be applied to achieve that goal by assuming that the underlying "design spaces" encompass much more than the features, configuration, and limitations of ERP software. It uses WST concepts to identify directions for achieving business value that might not be considered thoroughly in ERP implementations that focus primarily on converting from legacy software to ERP software. This paper starts by summarizing basic premises concerning the relationship between work systems and ERP. Focusing on the context of ERP usage, it explains the elements of the two central frameworks in WST, the work system framework and work system life cycle model. Instead of viewing the context as ERP usage or ERP projects, viewing the context as ERP-enabled work system improvement focuses attention on a number of paths toward greater business value that may not be used effectively in current practice. The paper discusses five relevant design spaces that are mentioned rarely, if at all, in current practice. Part of the paper's contribution is in making those ideas more explicit through framing the discussion around aspects of WST. Another part of its contribution is in providing a new way to discuss topics such as workarounds, add-ins, and exceptions that are sometimes controversial issues when ERP is used.

Business process management (BPM) has developed as a research field primarily situated in the computer and information systems sciences. Recently, van der Aalst (2013) analyzed the results of these research efforts and identified a set of research topics in the form of a series of BPM research use cases. Those BPM research use cases emphasize technological and computational challenges and solutions. Ideally, however, BPM research should also address managerial and organizational challenges that the existing technically oriented research use cases do not fully reflect. We propose expanding the scope and impact of BPM research by drawing on work system theory (WST) to identify new BPM research use cases and directions. After comparing a WST perspective on basic BPM topics with the technically oriented BPM perspective expressed in van der Aalst (2013), we present new research topics that extend the technically oriented BPM research use cases in van der Aalst (2013). We also present new...

The expanding focus on logistics management makes it necessary to rethink the concept of logistics organizations. In addition, there is a need for clarification of the relations between the practices of these organizations and the basic thinking that underlies their behavior. The paper presents a framework for understanding these relations by identifying certain teleological and ontological fundamentals of logistics organizational ideologies. We suggest certain principles and organizational practices that are underpinned by these ideologies. Furthermore, given the changes logistics organizations are experiencing today, we discuss how the changes are viewed within the various ideologies. We conclude that there is a need for improved ability to deal with change within logistics organizations, and that this can be achieved by adopting new theoretical and practical perspectives into the established ideologies of these organizations. The globalization of the economy and the technological development of electronic-based business have stimulated many firms to see logistics capabilities to be at the very heart of their competitive power.

The expanding focus on logistics management makes it necessary to rethink the concept of logistics organizations. In addition, there is a need for clarification of the relations between the practices of these organizations and the basic thinking that underlies their behavior. The paper presents a framework for understanding these relations by identifying certain teleological and ontological fundamentals of logistics organizational ideologies. We suggest certain principles and organizational practices that are underpinned by these ideologies. Furthermore, given the changes logistics organizations are experiencing today, we discuss how the changes are viewed within the various ideologies. We conclude that there is a need for improved ability to deal with change within logistics organizations, and that this can be achieved by adopting new theoretical and practical perspectives into the established ideologies of these organizations.

This paper proposes a modeling method (the work system modeling method WSMM) that addresses key issues related to enterprise and process modeling. Those issues lead to modeling method requirements that call for relaxing common assumptions about the nature of modeling methods and related modeling languages and metamodels. A summary of work system theory (WST) and the work system method (WSM) provides background for understanding WSMM. A design space for modeling positions most applications of WSM in relation to seven purposes of modeling that call for successively more formal approaches. WSMM is presented in relation to the seven purposes, thereby extending WSM in new directions. A final section summarizes how WSMM addresses the issues and requirements from the introduction, explains how coherence is maintained within WSMM, and identifies areas for future research.

Luc Hoebeke builds on the ideas of Checkland, Beer and the sociotech school, and combines theory with practice to show how organizations work. Based on a non-hierarchical model of organizations, his book provides a framework for recognizing the mechanisms for success of organizations and improving performances by highlighting and strengthening these mechanisms. The text encourages managers to reflect on their own experiences, to avoid the chaotic detail of constant change and to concentrate on their true strategic intentions. Read more about the book in the foreword by Peter Checkland

This essay challenges fundamental, silo-oriented assumptions about the IS discipline. It shows how work system theory and its extensions form a potential basis for overcoming that silo-orientation and finding and exploiting areas of overlap with other disciplines. Within the IS discipline, this paper shows how WST and extensions provide a basis for thinking differently about fundamental topics including the following: IS as a system-related discipline, system usage, sociotechnical systems, planned and emergent change in systems, system development and systems analysis and design, user participation and IS/IT projects, attaining value from IS and IT, IS success, business/IT alignment, and IS theories and a body of knowledge for IS. This paper also shows directions toward synergies and possible collaborations with other disciplines that build on areas of overlap.

Recent articles such as Avison and Malaurent (2014) and Grover and Lyytinen (2015) question taken-for-granted assumptions about the centrality of theory in research published in leading journals and the near necessity of following repetitive scripts that sometimes are an obstacle to creativity. This paper goes a step further by providing examples and observations that illustrate five seemingly insurmountable challenges related to attaining long-term value from theorizing about information systems. 1) Divergent definitions of basic terms makes it extremely difficult to accumulate IS knowledge. 2) The IS discipline seems to take for granted that knowledge must take the form of theory. 3) Many beliefs and practices related to IT will not hold still for long due to the rapid pace of technological change 4) Most concepts and phenomena that are relevant to IS are not uniquely about IS. 5) Institutional practices at multiple levels encourage use of scripts that are obstacles to creativity ...

This research essay illustrates how the IS discipline might pursue systems theories with the goal of understanding IS in new ways, generating innovative and useful systems theories, and achieving more impact in the world. It discusses recent articles that compare different perspectives and expectations related to theories and theorizing in the IS discipline. It uses the term domain-specific systems theory (DSST) to accentuate the difference between general systems theory (GST) and specific systems theories. It provides examples illustrating how DSSTs can illuminate important concerns that variance and process perspectives do not address directly. It shows how work system theory (WST) and several of its extensions are DSSTs that provide useful lenses for understanding, analyzing, and theorizing about systems in organizations. It concludes by summarizing ways in which the IS discipline might welcome systems theories more wholeheartedly.

Nothing is more practical than a good conceptual artifact... which Nothing is more practical than a good conceptual artifact... which may be a theory, framework, model, metaphor, paradigm or may be a theory, framework, model, metaphor, paradigm or perhaps some other abstraction perhaps some other abstraction

This paper proposes that basic ideas from the work system theory (WST) and the work system method (WSM) might serve as a front end to object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD), thereby providing a path from business-oriented descriptions to formal, technical specifications. After describing the background motivation and summarizing work system concepts, the paper uses a hiring system example to show how two tools from WSM can be used as a front end for OOAD, in effect, a step before creating use case diagrams and other types of Unified Modeling Language (UML) artifacts. Potential benefits of this approach stem from a business-oriented question, “how can we improve this work system's performance,” rather than an IT-oriented question, “how can we create a technical artifact that will be used?”

This paper explores how work system theory (WST) and related core ideas in various versions of the work system method (WSM) overlap with enterprise engineering and with the DEMO methodology. Based on the definition of work system, an enterprise can be viewed as a set of interacting work systems. A work system can be summarized at various levels of detail. The simplest level is basically a verb phrase. The next level is a "work system snapshot." More detailed descriptions are based on a work system metamodel. This paper's contribution is in two areas, 1) establishing links between WST/WSM and enterprise engineering in general and 2) comparing aspects of WST/WSM and DEMO and demonstrating similarities, thereby implying the possibility of converting DEMO models into work system models that can be developed further using other methods and tools designed around WST. Those synergies might support combining theoretical underpinnings of DEMO with the intuitive simplicity of the work system perspective, which has been applied by many hundreds of employed MBA and Executive MBA students who produced management briefings recommending improvements in work systems in their own organizations. The overlap between WST/WSM and DEMO is demonstrated using a DEMO representation of the OMG's EU Rent example [1], which illustrated OMG's Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) [2] and Business Motivation Model (BMM) [3]. A tabular summary called a work system snapshot captures much of a DEMO essential model of the EU Rent example. A more extensive summary based on a work system metamodel adds information for going from construction to implementation. The example illustrates how a work system perspective on a sociotechnical system fits with 7 postulates of an enterprise engineering manifesto [4] and with 7 enterprise engineering fundamentals [5], thereby suggesting the potential value of deeper exploration of those relationships.

The work system method (WSM) is a systems analysis method for thinking about systems in organizations whether or not complete data and technical expertise are available. WSM's goal is to help business professionals understand and communicate about a system at whatever level of detail is appropriate. WSM treats systems as sociotechnical work systems with human participants rather than technical systems with users. It applies a static view of systems, the work system framework, and a dynamic view, the work system life cycle model. It combines those frameworks with conventional problem solving by defining the system in relation to problems and opportunities, drilling down to understand the situation in more detail, and producing a justified recommendation. Over 600 employed MBA and Executive MBA students have used various versions of WSM to produce management briefings including recommendations about IT-reliant work systems in their own organizations. While WSM can stand alone to help business professionals, it also can be used in conjunction with tools and methods from Six Sigma and software development wherever sufficient data can be collected and where technical expertise is available.

This article presents work system theory (WST) as a body of theory for analysis, explanation, prediction, and design and action (Gregor, 2006) related to systems in organizations. It provides background about how WST evolved, summarizes major components of WST, and explains that each of the five types of theory identified by Gregor (2006) appears in WST. The discussion of WST emphasizes its overall contribution to knowledge by emphasizing areas in which it differs from commonly used terminology, frameworks, and beliefs within the IS field. In a discipline in which even basic terms such as system, service, implementation, and user have many contradictory meanings, a key goal of WST is to demonstrate the possibility of using an internally consistent set of assumptions, concepts, frameworks, and principles as a basis for analysis, explanation, prediction, and design and action.

Work system theory (WST) provides a bridge between managerial and technical perspectives on BPM that often seem distant from each other. In combination, the work system framework, underlying work system metamodel, and the work system life cycle model provide a number of bridges between those perspectives. In relation to managerial BPM, the work system framework treats "business process" as one of nine elements in a basic understanding of a work system. The others are participants, information, technology, products/services, customers, environment, infrastructure, and strategies. The underlying metamodel outlines a precise structure for analysis and design of work systems and for links to technical aspects of BPM. It provides details that are omitted from the work system framework, which has proven useful for initial high level summaries but is not granular enough to support detailed design and documentation. The work system life cycle model combines planned and unplanned (emergent) change through which work systems evolve. This paper explains where WST fits in the general realm of BPM-related topics and how WST might help in developing BPM further. It also identifies challenges and next steps related to using WST to expand the scope of BPM.

This paper explores linkages between work system theory (WST) and central concerns of the SIGPrag community related to theorizing the IT artifact and its organizational and societal context. The first part of the paper provides background about the development, basic ideas, and underlying premises of WST. In addition to summarizing older facets of WST, it summarizes three new extensions of WST, a service value chain framework for looking at service systems in terms of service concepts, a metamodel (Alter, 2010a) for looking at work systems in more depth than is supported easily by the work system framework, and a concept classification matrix (Alter, 2010e) that can support analysis and design activities and that might provide a way to organize a body of knowledge for the IS field. The second part of the paper returns to the questions about the fit and synergy between WST and the interests of the SIGPrag community. While it is clear that WST fits with central themes in pragmatist IS interests and research, such as usefulness, action, change, and knowledge, the potential synergy between WST and existing research topics in the SIGPrag community is not obvious.

This paper summarizes a framework for describing theoretical perspectives (an FDTP) and uses it to describe the work system perspective (WSP) in a way that integrates ideas that often had been discussed in isolation from each other. It also illustrates how the FDTP can support application of the WSP to the idea of digital transformation (DT). It discusses the general value of the FDTP along with potential applications.

Rethink the theoretical foundations of the IS discipline" is one of the grand challenges for IS research identified in a Delphi study in Business Information Systems Engineering (Becker et al., 2015). This draft addresses that challenge directly through an integrated approach to the operation and evolution of systems. Almost any attempt to articulate a theoretical foundation for IS (a TFIS) would need to cover that topic although other attempts might emphasize other topics and other viewpoints. Version 1.0 went to colleagues who provided early feedback at conferences or at university visits. It also went to co-authors and others who might find it useful. Feel free to forward the current version to anyone who might be interested. This document is long-50 pages-but it is designed like a slide presentation (one main idea on many pages, many diagrams, and use of bullet points for brevity) to allow relatively quick understanding of the overall approach and of how and why separate parts fit together as an integrated whole. Quick scan. The outline on page 3 summarizes how the main ideas are organized. Scrolling page by page provides a deeper overview in the sequence of headings and figures or tables. Concise bullet points identify key insights or issues. Integration is based on consistent use of a work system perspective that is summarized briefly. Many pages are understandable independent of surrounding pages. Deeper consideration. You might find value in deeper consideration of how some of this paper's ideas are related to your research interests, such as relevant ideas that you had not considered. Your insights about limitations of this approach might help in identifying future directions for your research. Goals. The proposed Theoretical Foundation for IS (TFIS) has three main goals: 1) Integration. Build outward from an integrated core. Do not accept the excuse that the IS field is not ready for a serious attempt at integration. 2) Usefulness. Contribute to describing, analyzing, designing, and evaluating systems, developing new tools and methods, and supporting empirical IS research. 3) Near-symmetry. Treat sociotechnical systems (with human participants) and totally automated systems as similarly as possible. Trends toward digitalization, automation, AI, and robotics imply benefits from that type of near-symmetry for understanding changes in the "division of labor." I hope you have time to consider whether this overall approach is plausible and might have useful implications for your research or teaching. I would appreciate any comments you might have even though I recognize that many who see this are too busy to spend time on it. Again, feel free to forward this DRAFT to anyone who might be interested.

Rethink the theoretical foundations of the IS discipline" is one of the grand challenges for IS research identified in a Delphi study in Business Information Systems Engineering (Becker et al., 2015). This draft addresses that challenge directly through an integrated approach to the operation and evolution of systems. Almost any attempt to articulate a theoretical foundation for IS (a TFIS) would need to cover that topic although other attempts might emphasize other topics and other viewpoints. Version 1.0 went to colleagues who provided early feedback at conferences or at university visits. It also went to co-authors and others who might find it useful. Feel free to forward the current version to anyone who might be interested. This document is long -50 pages -but it is designed like a slide presentation (one main idea on many pages, many diagrams, and use of bullet points for brevity) to allow relatively quick understanding of the overall approach and of how and why separate parts fit together as an integrated whole.

This essay presents a new approach for visualizing and organizing IS-related knowledge and expanding that knowledge. It mentions several approaches that might seem relevant before proposing a new approach that combines ideas from two sources, a taxonomy of "knowledge objects" (KOs) and the work system perspective (WSP), including several new extensions of work system theory (WST). Its contribution is the rationale and structure of a work system knowledge model (WSKM) that is potentially useful for organizing a significant fraction of knowledge related to IS.

This paper describes the process of a post-implementation review of WebCT introduction at Eastern CSU. It is based on structured interviews of twenty faculty members and nineteen students who were are using this technology. These interviews were summarized using a software program for processing unstructured text, NVivo. The report analyzes the usage of WebCT among faculty and students within the University, the organizational structures and procedures that were established at ECSU to implement WebCT, its impact on the teaching practices at the university, and shows some problematic areas that the users of WebCT are having, which might be of usefulness to other similar endeavors elsewhere.

The work system method is a recent approach for better holistic analysis of organizational problems involving the use of information technology. We present the results from an exploratory field experiment on the impact of the work system framework as a vehicle for improvement of student understanding of a business situation involving an information system (IS) implementation problem. We provide a brief overview of the work system method, present the setup of the field experiment and discuss the results and a few directions for further research.

The work system method is a recent approach for better holistic analysis of organizational problems involving the use of information technology. We present the results from an exploratory field experiment on the impact of the work system framework as a vehicle for improvement of student understanding of a business situation involving an information system (IS) implementation problem. We provide a brief overview of the work system method, present the setup of the field experiment and discuss the results and a few directions for further research.

The work system method is a recent approach for better analysis of organizational systems problems involving the use of information technology. We present the results from an ex-ploratory field experiment on the impact of the work system framework as a vehicle for improvement of student understanding of a business case involving an information system (IS) implementation problem. We provide a brief overview of the work system method, present the setup of the field experiment and discuss the results after which the paper concludes with directions for further re-search.

The Work System Method (WSM) has been getting wider attention by the Information Systems research community recently. Its potential for improving the practicing and teaching of Systems Analysis and Design (SA&D) is one of the directions of growing research associated with it. This paper provides the results from an exploratory research on the acceptance of the work system method by students in an undergraduate SAD course at a public US university. The research questions relate to the revealing of student perceptions about the WSM training received during the course, overall student opinion of WSM, the impact of some characteristics of the WSM on success in SA&D, the physical accessibility of the WSM and whether the students would use WSM even if it was not required. The initial results are promising regarding the relevance of WSM for teaching systems analysis and its acceptance by students.