Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
dependent contractors” (see http://www.fedexdriverslawsuit.com/). There is no observable, intrinsic
characteristic of drivers that enables an objective classification. Federal Express has classified drivers
as independent contractors, and as a result, the company has not paid benefits or the employer's portion
of FICA taxes for the drivers. However, the concept of “employment” is socially constructed (Searle
2006) and subject to the laws (policies and rules) enacted by the government and interpreted by the
court system. If the judicial system decides in favor of the drivers, then all of the transactions (events)
in which the drivers and Federal Express participated must be recast from “contractor transactions” to
“employee transactions.” As a result, Federal Express could be required to pay over $1 billion in back
taxes. Complicating matters further, the laws governing the definition of employee are defined by dif-
ferent state legislatures and interpreted by the courts within those states. It is conceivable that drivers in
some states could be deemed contractors by those courts while drivers in other states could be deemed
employees, even if the relationship between the drivers and Federal Express is exactly the same.
Information System Conceptualizations
Conceptualizing an information system as a state-tracking mechanism and an event as the transition
from an initial to a subsequent state is insufficient for this type of analysis. For such analysis, an infor-
mation system must be conceptualized as an event-processing mechanism and an event as the cause of
the transition from an initial state to a subsequent state via the application of its rules.
Business events are frequently artificial and intentional—agreed upon occurrences initiated by agents
within the business system. To the extent that an information system must calculate the appropriate
state with respect to business work systems and processes, the rules for the attribution of state must
be represented within it. Placement of a customer order, for example, is an artificial, agreed-upon, and
intentional business event. In a job-shop manufacturing organization, the “place order” event may be
described by the prices and quantities of products ordered and the order due date (all agreed-upon and
ascribed attributes). It affects the customer, the salesperson, the procurement of raw materials, production
schedules, employee assignments, and so forth in prescribed ways, i.e., according to the rules (policies)
of the business. Presented with a “place order” event, an active information system applies the rules of
the business to calculate the resultant states of affected objects. An information system may be designed
to store the event or it may be designed to store the resultant state. This decision is made for reasons of
both efficiency and flexibility. However, at the conceptual level, these events and rules are important
elements of the representation.
When the business rules associated with an event are subjective, ill defined, or too complex for ef-
fective automation, or when an organization chooses to do so, the rules can be applied and the resultant
states determined outside the information system. In that case, the role of the information system is
not to actively participate in that event but to simply (and passively) record the results. Consider, for
example, inventory management. An organization typically determines a set of attributes that it ascribes
to its products, such as product name, SKU, description, unit of sale, price, and warehouse location. It
then determines a value for each attribute of each product and ascribes them appropriately. This is an
event initiated by the marketing department of an organization. The rules by which the marketing de-
partment determines these attributes and values are typically considered to be outside the scope of the
information system. Hence, marketing information systems are typically designed to passively capture
the values of such attributes when these events occur without any representation of the rules by which
they are determined.
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