Lessons learned from manual systems: designing information systems based on the situational theory of agency - Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - page 166

where we would argue that the situational theory of agency provides a better description
of purposeful activity.
Although it is possible to design information systems for pressured routine environments
using traditional methodologies, many of these systems are ineffective, inefficient or
not accepted by people using them. They work technically but fail, in the context in
which they are placed, to support the routine work adequately. We have reason to believe
that in order to achieve greater success and acceptance of information systems in routine
environments, we need a methodology that explicitly acknowledges the situatedness of
socio-technical systems and their components, of which human actors and technical
artefacts are examples.
Our long-term aim 1 is to develop a situational information systems analysis and design
methodology informed by the situational theory of agency. The first step is to establish
an initial methodology to use in later stages of the research, which will employ action
research. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to develop a first-cut of such a method-
ology based on concepts from the situational theory of agency and supplemented by
our exploration of evolved manual situational systems. Although the methodology is
intended for designing computerised systems, the specific focus of this paper is on
learning lessons from existing manual situational systems so that the initial methodology,
based on the situational theory of agency, can incorporate and generalise important
features of situated systems that are currently in use and known to be effective.
The method we use in the paper is first to extract key concepts from the situational
theory of agency as it is understood in robotics and discussed in other disciplines. Based
on these concepts, we draw up a skeleton of a methodology for analysing systems. Fol-
lowing this, we examine several manual systems that have been either designed by users
or evolved from practice, and that are both discussed in the literature and appear to be
situational. We begin by establishing that the systems can be explained using the situ-
ational theory of agency. These systems are then used to understand how to apply con-
cepts from the situational theory in practical systems before incorporating our experiences
into the tentative methodology. We conclude by showing how we intend to refine the
methodology.
Information systems design and theories of agency
We have argued previously (Johnston and Milton, 2002b) that existing information
systems implicitly support the deliberative theory of agency. According to this theory
(Johnston and Brennan, 1996), purposeful action proceeds by an agent building an ab-
stract model or representation of the external objective world from sense data and then
reasoning about this model to determine actions that will achieve goals. For example,
in traditional transaction-based information systems, 'transactions' are gathered that
represent changes in the world. Data models that correspond to the representation scheme
are used to design operational databases that are affected by the transactions. In extreme
cases, such as MRPII (Wight, 1981), application programs also deduce goal-attaining
actions and human actors are only required to define the goal state, execute the actions
in reality by following automatically generated schedules and provide sense data by
recording transactions. More typically, applications programs help human actors to
make decisions by providing information about objects from reality using data gained
through transactions. Decision support systems are good examples of this type of system.

1

This program at The University of Melbourne is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP0451524.