Abstract
The twenty-first century business environment is extremely competitive and challenging. It forces organisations to deploy strategies in order to maintain their position in the marketplace. As a result, they should modify their current practices and transform themselves in a way that they can cope with existing challenges. But they do not reflect these changes in their IT systems. First, the pace of the change is fast, and organisations are forced to change their business rules and processes frequently. But they do not reflect these changes in their IT systems. Second, organisations utilise IT systems without carefully considering its effects on other parts of the organisation. Therefore, the challenge is to organically align IT with business activities in order to improve the overall performance. The solution to this challenge is to co-design the business and IT systems. Co-design of business and IT is a field that concerns with gathering and processing knowledge from different parts of an organisation to transform business processes and IT systems simultaneously. This paper aims to expand co-design theory and also to develop a co-design method to offer practical solutions for aligning business processes and IT systems. The organisational semiotics is the theoretical and methodological foundation of this research.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Beynon-Davis, P.: Significant threads: The nature of data. International Journal of Information Management 29(3), 170–188 (2009)
Boness, K.: Goal-Refinement Appraisal of Soft Projects (GRASAP). Doctoral Thesis, University of Reading (2011)
Boness, K., Finkelstein, A., Harrison, R.: A method for assessing confidence in requirements analysis. Information and Software Technology 53(10), 1084–1096 (2011)
Buede, D.M.: The engineering design of systems: models and methods, 2nd edn. Wiley-Blackwell (2009)
Checkland, P., Scholes, J.: Soft Systems Methodology In Action. John Wiley & Sons Ltd., Chichester (1990)
Daft, R.L.: Organization Theory and Design. South Western Educational Publishing, Hampshire (2007)
Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR): Guidelines for Managing Projects, UK (2007), http://www.berr.gov.uk
Gasson, S.: A Framework for the Co-Design of Business and IT Systems. In: Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-41), pp. 348–358 (2008)
Gustafsson, P., Höök, D., Franke, U., Johnson, P.: Modeling the IT Impact on Organizational Structure. In: Proceeding of the IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, pp. 14–23 (2009)
Liu, K.: Semiotics in Information Systems Engineering. Cambridge University Press, UK (2000)
Liu, K., Karimi Sani, N., Ketabchi, S., Mcloughlin, E.: Co-design of an Adaptable System for Information Management. In: The 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2011), Beijing, China (2011a)
Liu, K., Sun, L., Tan, S.: Modelling complex systems for project planning: a semiotics motivated method. International Journal of General Systems 35(3), 313–327 (2006)
Liu, K., Sun, L., Bennett, K.: Co-Design of Business and IT Systems. Information Systems Frontiers 4(3), 251–256 (2002)
Liu, K., Sun, L., Jambari, D., Michell, V., Chong, S.: A Design of Business-Technology Alignment Consulting Framework. In: Mouratidis, H., Rolland, C. (eds.) CAiSE 2011. LNCS, vol. 6741, pp. 422–435. Springer, Heidelberg (2011b)
Mintzberg, H.: The Structuring of Organization: A synthesis of the Research. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1979)
Mintzberg, H.: Mintzberg on Management: Inside Our Strange World of Organizations. Hungry Minds Inc., New York (1989)
Pessman, R.S.: Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 5th edn. McGraw-Hill (2003)
Pessman, R.S.: Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 6th edn. McGraw-Hill (2007)
Salter, A., Liu, K.: Using Semantic Analysis and Norm Analysis to Model Organisations. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Ciudad Real, Spain, pp. 847–850 (2002)
Snoeck, M., Michiels, C.: Domain Modeling and the Co-Design of Business Rules and in the Telecommunication Business Area. Information Systems Frontiers 4(3), 331–342 (2002)
Stamper, R.K.: Language and Computer in Organized Behaviour. In: van de Riet, R.P., Meersman, R. (eds.) Linguistics Instruments in Knowledge Engineering, pp. 143–163. Elsevier Science, Amsterdam (1992)
Simon, H.A.: The Structure of Ill-Structured Problems. Artificial Intelligence 4, 145–180 (1973)
Tam, M.M.C., Choi, D.H.L., Chung, W.W.C.: Innovative approach to co-design of information systems: a case study in a small manufacturing business. In: Hawaii International Conference on Information Systems: Collaboration Technology Organizational Systems and Technology, Hawaii, USA (1994)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sani, N.K., Ketabchi, S., Liu, K. (2012). The Co-design of Business and IT Systems: A Case in Supply Chain Management. In: Dua, S., Gangopadhyay, A., Thulasiraman, P., Straccia, U., Shepherd, M., Stein, B. (eds) Information Systems, Technology and Management. ICISTM 2012. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 285. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29166-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29166-1_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-29165-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-29166-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)