Information systems technology grounded on institutional facts - Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - page 83

The schemas defining types of institutional facts define a transcendent ontology for the
information systems supporting the creation of institutional facts and keeping records
of them. Data models for particular systems are representations of and implementations
of aspects of the ontology. The technology implementing these data models works only
because of the behavioural disciplines that implement the framing rules of the various
speech acts. If each letter placing an order requires separate consideration and is treated
in a unique way, the order entry system of the supplier can't work the way we expect
it to. But of course the transcendent ontology is only the formal part of the system. The
context of all speech acts includes the background, which is characteristic of particular
institutions and differs between institutions.
How does this view help?
The theory described in this paper can be considered as a theory for design and action
in the taxonomy of Gregor (2002). As such, it should be useful in guiding future designs.
One thing the theory does is explain why SQL and other logical databases are overwhelm-
ingly the platform of choice in information systems implementations. This, however,
does not seem to be a controversial situation. It is not a matter for concern, and there
are no serious proposals for any other kind of platform. So to have value, the theory in
this paper must do more.
The success of logical databases in information systems is most apparent in systems that
serve highly focused organisational subunits. These are the subunits responsible for
limited classes of speech acts, so needing records of limited classes of institutional facts.
These are also the levels of institutional structure where the informal behaviour patterns
and norms are the most stable, so where the background aspect of the context for the
institutional facts is the most uniform.
As a result of success at this scale, there has been for many years a push to tie the inform-
ation systems together. More recently, the availablity of cheap and powerful communic-
ation facilities has led to a push for tying together information systems of separate or-
ganisations into what may be thought of as world-scale computing. Although there have
been successes at both of these enterprises, there have been many failures, with projects
abandoned after vast expenditure. The idea that logical databases work well because
they manage institutional facts can explain the successes and failures, and can be used
to predict a priori whether a given project proposal has a chance of success.
The first of these enterprises, that of tying together the information systems in a single
large organisation, was given a formulation as an extension of logical database technology
in the federated database movement whose strategies are summarised by Sheth and
Larsen (1990). The idea was that if we had many individual information systems, we
could build a single big system by federating the data models and schemas of the local
systems without requiring changes in the local systems. These efforts often failed, an
example being the CS90 project of Westpac Bank in Australia in the late 1980s, which
was abandoned after several years at a cost reported to be about A$500 million. Other
major banking projects of the type were similarly abandoned at even higher costs.
In terms of the present theory, the reason these projects failed is that the speech acts
performed by the organisation did not extend to the appropriate scale. The organisational
subunits are in fact generally created to perform the limited class of speech act, and the
framing rules for the speech act are often largely limited to things within the scope of
that organisational unit. In a bank of the 1970s the savings accounts would be managed
by a department, which would define what a customer was, the rules for interest pay-