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This paper contributes to the initial development of organisational design and engineering (ODE). It proposes a work system perspective on ODE by showing how work system concepts provide a basis for discussing and researching areas where behavioural science and computer science are jointly relevant to the operation and success of IT-reliant work sy...
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Context 1
... goal was to develop a systems analysis method that can be used by business professionals for their own understanding and can support communication between business and IT professionals. Figure 3 shows the work system framework, which identifies nine elements that should be considered in even a rudimentary understanding of a work system. The second central framework of the work system approach is the work system life cycle model (Figure 4), which summarises how work systems change over time. ...
Context 2
... nine elements of the work system framework ( Figure 3) are the basis for describing and analysing an IT-reliant work system in an organisation. The framework outlines a static view of a work system's form and function at a point in time and is designed to emphasise business rather than IT concerns. ...
Context 3
... contrast with the static view in Figure 3, the work system life cycle model (WSLC) in Figure 4 outlines a work system's evolution over time through iterations of planned and unplanned change. Planned change in the WSLC is represented by projects that include initiation, development, and implementation phases. ...
Context 4
... The work system framework ( Figure 3) identifies nine elements required in even a rudimentary understanding of a work system. ODE should attend to all of those elements. ...
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Citations
... Our research uses the theoretical lens of work systems which helps to better understand the real world during action research projects (Alter 2013(Alter , 2018a. Beyond pure understanding, a work system perspective has been shown to help think about system design, specifically at the interface of organizations and technology (Alter 2010). For instance, normative principles and fundamental axioms for generic work systems have been developed (Alter 2004(Alter , 2017(Alter , 2024. ...
... The broader horizon, away from a purely technical perspective, allows greater consideration of the works system context and avoids a disjunctive view of people and technology (Alter 2003). With work systems as the unit of analysis, a strong focus can be placed on information and knowledge within the organizational context (Alter 2010). While shaping digital transformations and potentially introducing new or increasingly automated information systems (IS), context-related work practices can be taken into account to avoid cultural misfits (Alter 2003(Alter , 2024Gimpel et al. 2020). ...
The success of palliative care requires collaboration among multiple professions within a sensibly digitized work system. The diverse perspectives and expertise of team members inform their collective endeavor, often leading to differing interpretations and priorities in patient care. This diversity necessitates a continual exchange of knowledge and information. Current technologies, including the hospital information system, do not foster such collaboration, particularly in palliative care. This study explores digital enhancements that can promote multi-professional collaboration (MPC). The authors employed action design research and used a work system theory lense to examine the palliative care work systems in two hospital wards in Germany. Through extensive on-site observations and interventions with practitioners, the study identified challenges that arose during MPC. This paper presents the proposed organizational and technical solutions. The paper provides design principles and guidelines for a collaboration support system to maximize MPC. Theoretical contributions include insights into the challenges of MPC and design knowledge about collaboration support. This work can inform practitioners about common challenges and offers potential solutions and guidance for implementing a collaboration support system.
... Additionally, these capabilities did not exhibit the same level of granularity. For instance IT infrastructure (Mettler 2011b), people (Carvalho et al., 2017), and work practices (Mettler, 2011b) were contrasted by specific capabilities such as ease of maintenance (Alter, 2010), electronic medical record (Carvalho et al., 2017), and process participants (Alter, 2013). In order to adapt our capability areas and capabilities to and evaluate their relevance for the BM context, we used our result from step A to conduct a second literature review in step B. ...
As instrumental healthcare institutions providing high quality patient care, hospitals are currently facing multiple challenges ranging from pressure to reduce costs to a rapidly increasing elderly population. From a process perspective hospitals feature support and management processes, which enable the core process of providing patient care. One of the most crucial process areas – bed management – refers primarily to logistics processes related to the physical beds in hospitals. However, these are closely intertwined with diverse management and support processes (e.g., occupancy management). In order to conceptualize bed management as a process area from a holistic perspective, we develop a capability framework based on a thorough literature review as well as subsequent evaluation of the framework’s relevance, completeness, and practical applicability in two German hospitals. The capability framework includes 30 capabilities grouped into six overarching capability areas. It suggests that efficient and effective bed management is predicated on pooling organizational resources from various organizational units and functional areas. Our work serves as a foundation for the development of a respective maturity model. It enables practitioners to systematically manage capabilities related to bed management and supports them in deriving roadmaps, conducting fit/gap analyses, and prioritizing topics, while accounting for the hospital-specific context.
... Other seminal sociotechnical works that contributed to the IS discipline include methodologies such as ETHICS for designing computer-assisted work (e.g., Mumford and Weir 1979), or the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) for designing IS (e.g., Checkland et al. 1990). In this context, it is worth noting that the very first volume of MIS Quarterly celebrated the sociotechnical perspective by including two seminal papers by Bostrom and Heinen that highlighted the sociotechnical perspective and its relevance to understanding IS failures (Bostrom and Heinen 1977a;Bostrom and Heinen 1977b (Lyytinen and Newman 2008), IS innovation (Avgerou and McGrath 2007), knowledge management (Pan and Scarbrough 1998), human-computer interaction (Alter 2010), mobile work (Sawyer et al. 2003), and group processes and interactions (Jensen et al. 2010) have been studied using a sociotechnical perspective. These are but some of the reasons why we believe that the IS discipline needs to continue to engage with and draw inspiration from this perspective. ...
The sociotechnical perspective is often seen as one of the foundational viewpoints-or an "axis of cohesion"-for the Information Systems (IS) discipline, contributing to both its distinctiveness and its ability to coherently expand its boundaries. However, our review of papers in the two leading IS journals from 2000-2016 suggests that IS research has lost sight of the discipline's sociotechnical character that was widely acknowledged at the discipline's inception. This is a problem because an axis of cohesion can be fundamental to a discipline's long-term vitality. In order to address this issue, we offer ways to renew the sociotechnical perspective so that it can continue to serve as a distinctive and coherent foundation for the discipline. Our hope is that the renewed sociotechnical frame for the discipline discussed in the paper holds potential to contribute to the enduring strength of our diverse, distinctive, and yet unified discipline. It also prompts members of the discipline to think more deeply about what it means to be an IS scholar.
... Furthermore, several studies suggest that BI foresight in the firm may be viewed in the context of CI, which requires an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from fields which include marketing, strategic and innovation management, futures studies, enterprise architecture and IT governance, advanced resource planning, and knowledge work informatics. The idea of embedding BI foresight throughout an organization using IT tools suggests incorporating IT-reliant work systems theory (Alter, 2010), along with frameworks by Markku Nurminen (1997) and other scholars who have investigated embedding knowledge management systems in the workplace. With these thoughts in mind, the authors suggest that BI foresight and IT tools form the basis of successful long-term planning in the firm and invite many opportunities for future research. ...
As educators and practitioners, the authors are interested in how to create and develop agile growth companies. They have noticed that business intelligence (BI) is often focused on short-term operative decision-making. At the same time, the authors have envisioned that BI also has potential to provide companies with a better understanding of the future business environment for long-term planning. By putting all the pieces of the puzzle together from the articles in the literature review, the authors identified two themes crucial to the success of BI foresight activities in the firm:
· Support of top management and active participation in BI activities throughout the enterprise;
· The IS must be positioned to avoid over-reliance on IT and a mindless approach to data analysis.
Empowered by these observations, the authors investigated how BI foresight may be embedded in a company culture, utilized in daily activities by human actors in their work roles, and determined whether specially designed IT tools past the experimental stage can be successfully implemented in the firm. The results of this study suggest that detection of weak signals or shifts in the periphery of the horizon during environmental scanning is difficult. BI foresight activities in many companies are not well managed or simply do not exist. In particular, the topic of BI foresight in SMEs is under-researched. Yet it is precisely these activities that companies must embrace in order to achieve competitive advantage in the global market place.
... These knowledge processes are embedded in the knowledge system which in this context covers all areas of work systems (Alter, 2010). This does not only include ICT but also the people involved, organizational rules, and the processes performed. ...
... A work system design space is a set of things that might change or whose problematic nature might impel change in relation to any work system element, any subsystem of a work system, or the work system as a whole. To date, seven such design spaces have been described [2]. Most have been used informally but there is no data about whether those design spaces influenced decisions. ...
This tutorial explains the most current version of work system theory (WST) and shows how WST and several direct extensions can be applied in the work system method (WSM), a systems analysis method developed over several decades for use by business professionals.
... This paper uses a work system lens based on [3,4] to provide that type of integrated perspective. Aspects of that approach appeared previously in [2], which proposed a set of work system-inspired design spaces for OD/EE. The current paper focuses specifically on extending the topics in the current Editorial. ...
This paper explains how organizational design/ enterprise engineering can be viewed as an operational work system that produces designs, models, and/or specifications along with the related understandings, discussions, and commitments. It applies a work system lens to visualize a typical work system that performs organizational design/ enterprise engineering. It uses the same lens to identify possibilities for research on the related topics.
... Las estrategias de TI, cuando se planean están orientadas fundamentalmente al logro de la eficiencia en determinadas funciones y no en los procesos [22]. Tampoco se orientan con frecuencia a habilitar innovaciones en los sistemas de trabajo [23] o a nuevos modelos de negocio [24]. ...
RESUMEN La integración de capacidades de las Tecnologías de la Información (TI) es un imperativo para el desarrollo de las organizaciones. Por consiguiente, la gestión de soluciones basadas en las capacidades de estas tecnologías tiene un carácter estratégico. Sin embargo, todavía la práctica actual de integración de las TI en el contexto organizacional conduce a diseños fragmentados y poco sostenibles. Para revertir esta problemática, se han identificado las potencialidades de las ontologías computacionales como recursos de conocimiento que permiten manejar la complejidad de esta integración. Con el desarrollo de la ingeniería ontológica se ha generado una masa crítica de ontologías que representan modelos de referencia para la integración. Sin embargo, aún estos recursos están poco socializados. El presente artículo tiene el objetivo de caracterizar algunas de estas ontologías. Es una respuesta a la necesidad de generar mayores niveles de adaptación a los constantes y complejos cambios en las TI. ABSTRACT The integration of capabilities based on Information Technology (IT) is mandatory for organizational development. Thus, the management of organizational solutions based on such capabilities is strategic. However, the current routine for integrating IT based capabilities in the organizational context generates fragmented and unsustainable designs. In order to solve such issues, computational ontologies potentialities have been studied. Ontologies are knowledge resources that allow managing the complexity of such integration. With the ontological engineering development, some ontologies that represent best practices for organizational integration have emerged. Nevertheless, such ontologies are not socialized enough. The goal of this paper is to characterize some of them, in order to contribute to the necessity of adapting to the constant and complex technological changes.
... A design phase identifies possible improvements and proposes specific improvements. The design phase may use one or more "design spaces" [7]. ...
... An extension that is significant for current purposes is a work system metamodel ( Fig. 1) that reinterprets the work system framework, creating a more detailed view of a work system that is more useful for systems analysis and design. Other extensions that are not directly relevant for the current discussion include work system design spaces [7], work system principles [8], rephrasing of the work system metamodel in relation to service systems, a theory of workarounds, a taxonomy of system interactions, an approach for incorporating more knowledge into systems analysis and design, and a proposal for using work system concepts to organize a body of knowledge for information systems. ...
... The snapshot helps in discussing the scope of the work system that has the problem or opportunity, but is not as good for going into more depth, understanding operational details and related issues, and designing work system improvements that might involve changes in any work system element. In conjunction with a series of work system design spaces [7] the work system metamodel provides better support for that effort. Illustrating that type of support, Table 3, includes specifics such as triggers, preconditions, business rules, and post-conditions. ...
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.
... A work system design space is a category of things that might change or whose problematic nature might impel change in relation to any work system element, any subsystem of a work system, or the work system as a whole. [23] To date, seven such design spaces have been described, each of which might indicate a possible direction for extension of BPM. ...
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.
