Information Technology Reference
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The CAiSE community rejected these two approaches, because they were not
relevant to explore and explain design situations, impacts, etc. It did not follow
a grey approach - to stay in the middle. It created another approach, out of these
lazy approaches.
2. In its second dimension , the shift has significant impact on informatics because
it introduces subtle differences, too often neglected, which induced deep trans-
formations in methods and knowledge. Before IS, software was recognized
as a real discipline after a long and painful process of emergence. Software
is a dematerialized object and the software industry becomes the industry,
which gathered the most fruitfully know-how, technical knowledge, meth-
ods, in the engineering field of dematerialized objects. But, software is not
IS engineering, even if the two domains share a lot of similar concepts and
ways of reasoning. Even Information Technology (IT) is not IS engineering.
Both, software and IT take into account only generic functions or uses. IS
has to take into account actors who will use IS in the accurate situations of
their responsibilities. Thus, IS must be flexible because situations of actors
are not unchanging. Due to the IS stakes, informatics has to be re-invented,
for instance to support effectively and efficiently the various situations of IS
evolution.
In the view to this second dimension, some approaches claim that the problem
is only to customize generic software with parameterisation for instance: Other
ones claim that there is no problem at all because users must only adapt their
behaviour to the new IT products or the new software. Such approaches at the
scientific level dodge the IS complexity.
The CAiSE community worked explicitly or tacitly towards the emergence of
IS knowledge related with software and IT but also different from them.
3. In its third dimension , the shift has significant impact on management. Indeed, if
informatics is only composed with products, managers can continue to work as
usually or eventually becoming users of some IS functions. But the shift induces
another completely different position of managers: actors, who are able to mix
their activities with artificial supports provided by the IS, and even authors, who
are able to co-create some relevant IS parts. In both cases, there are great stakes
at the personal level and the firm level: it is the question of creating new value
by means of IS or maintaining activities at a sufficient level of efficiency, given
the competition.
4. The fourth dimension of the shift considers the relations between human
activities and information systems. The question is not to translate activities
performed by actors into informatics - it is not a question to automate such
a translation process. The question is much more interesting than only to find
generic systems to solve the problem . In fact, there is no problem at this dimen-
sion. Actor is not a problem, but a person. The question is not to transform actors
into conductors of robots but to support efficiently their activities. The main
question is then how to assure entente between human capabilities and artificial
information systems at the level of an organisation.
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