Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
ments, what addresses were kept, and so on. The home mortgage department would
have analogous definitions, but there would have been no mechanisms to synchronise
them. Also, different types of speech act have framing rules that take different things
into account. A two-year-old might be a valid customer for a savings account, but not
for a home mortgage, for example. Large organisations typically support hundreds of
separate information systems serving low-level organisational units or specialised staff
functions, and the speech acts performed by these subunits are typically uncoordinated.
Furthermore, each organisational subunit has its own culture, so contributes a different
background to the context of the speech acts for which it is responsible.
To integrate the information systems supporting these organisational subunits required
far too much negotiation and resolution of different views of what were in principle
common concerns, beyond what was needed to support the speech acts for which these
units were actually responsible.
Tying together the information systems of a large organisation turned out not to be
primarily a technical problem. It did require a large investment in technology, but was
also predicated on extending the scope of the speech acts performed by the organisation
to encompass all of the interactions needed to serve particular stakeholders. This involves
not only the formal rules but requires creating a common culture so as to create a uniform
background. This extension of scope is called business process reorganisation. If a bank
wants to provide a web interface integrating all the services it provides to a given cus-
tomer, the various departments need to come to a common definition of what a customer
is, how they are named, what addresses they can have, under what conditions a customer
is enabled to access a particular product, and so on. Making these decisions then reor-
ganising the organisational subunits to work from the now larger scale ontology is a
major cost to the organisation. Investment in technology is an enabling factor for business
process reorganisation, but is not the major cost.
The prediction of the theory is that no proposal to integrate the separate information
systems of organisational subunits is likely to succeed unless the organisation is rebuilt
so that the speech acts it performs are at the scale of the whole of business interaction
with classes of stakeholders. Once the speech acts are at the right scale, the consequently
revised schemas and models will be able to be integrated in a relatively straightforward
way. So the failure of the federated database approach to information systems integration
can be retrodicted by the theory.
A similar problem has arisen more recently with the Internet. Since it has become tech-
nically feasible to interconnect systems operated by different organisations, people have
been talking about interoperation. Of course people have been able to find resources
using text database technology (search engines), and to compose individually selected
services for particular purposes, but the dream is to be able to interoperate automatically
using logical database technology. (This is often called use of intelligent agents.)
There are a number of manifestations of this dream, the most recent and concrete of
which is the semantic web (Berners-Lee and Fischetti, 1999). There are a fair number of
developments of what might be thought of as infrastructure for interoperation, for ex-
ample XML, RDF, OWL, SOAP and WSDL
1
. There is a sometimes not clearly expressed
dream that if you represent your web site or database in XML, or if you put descriptors
on your site using RDF or OWL, then you can interoperate using logical database tech-
nology with anybody else who does so too.
1
More details of any of these can be obtained from www.w3c.org
Search WWH ::
Custom Search