Information systems technology grounded on institutional facts - Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - page 77

7. Information systems technology
grounded on institutional facts
Robert M. Colomb, School of Information Technology and
Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland
Abstract
This paper presents a theory explaining the success of information systems development
based on SQL-type database technology by showing that the assumptions underlying
that technology correspond very closely to the way Searle's institutional facts are created.
The theory presented is a theory of action and design, so its productivity is shown by
retrodiction of the necessity for business process engineering to achieve integration of
information systems within an organisation, and prediction that interorganisational in-
tegration of information systems using the internet can succeed only if the applications
share institutional facts. The theory is used to predict that autonomous intelligent agent
applications can succeed in the information spaces populated by these common institu-
tional facts.
Introduction
Information systems are generally and very successfully implemented using a particular
sort of technology typified by relational database systems, which I will call logical
databases for reasons that will be explained below. There are alternative technologies.
Why have logical database systems been successful?
Information systems have, for the most part, been successful in relatively restricted or-
ganisational subunits. A large organisation therefore may have hundreds of information
systems. Over the past two decades organisations have been trying to develop information
systems implemented by logical databases at the scale of the whole, typically by integ-
rating the successful local systems. There are successes, but it has turned out that it re-
quires an enormous effort, including changes in the way the organisation sees itself (e.g.
through business process re-engineering), in order to achieve success. The question is:
why is it so hard to extend successful local information systems to an organisation-scale
system?
Organisations interoperate with other organisations in a global economy. A global
communication infrastructure now exists which makes it easy for anyone to communicate
with anyone else. There is a strong business case to interconnect the logical database-
implemented systems of multiple organisations for a wide variety of purposes. But if it
is hard to integrate systems within a single organisation, what hope is there for integration
across organisations? After all, many of the things done to achieve single-organisation
integration depend strongly on central management commitment. There is by definition
no central management where the problem is to integrate systems across organisations.
What can we hope to achieve?
We have a technology that works extremely well on a small scale, is difficult but possible
to adapt to an organisational scale, and which we now want to further adapt to a global
scale. The thesis of this paper is that in order to understand what is feasible on the