From Sustainable Information System with a Farandole of Models to Services - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 5

To conclude, the shift with its four dimensions constitutes a real complexity.
The IS pioneers worked with no certainty, just with a creative intuition of their
future utility, to discover how to deal with such unknown complexity. They were
confident on the future relevance and usefulness of their research and developments.
In fact, many resemblances emerged between their situation and that of pioneers of
informatics. The IS pioneers discovered relevant models, combining management
and informatics. Their master concept of their exploration was information .
2.3 Governance of Information Systems
Information systems introduce the complexity of mixing human activities and infor-
matics, of designing this mix and of managing its evolutions. But the world of
human activities and the world of informatics do not have the same properties, the
same criteria of quality. Each one has its own autonomy in its transformations and
its movements, which are greatly independent one from the other. Thus, the IS gov-
ernance requires a much more sophisticated approach than alignment 3 of these two
worlds. In fact, their alignment is impossible. A promising approach to pierce the IS
complexity is to consider the interoperability of these two worlds and to discover the
conceptual overlap between them by exploring their common concepts. The major
concept is then concept information as it provides a hinge between the world of
human activities and the world of informatics. In fact this overlap is a true domain
by itself, often called the conceptual world (e.g. conceptual model)
Thus, the IS domain can be analysed as the combination of three worlds: the
world of human activities, the world of information, and the world of informat-
ics. In the following the chapter describes the interoperability between these three
worlds. It presents the IS governance as the way to assure the entente between these
worlds in a given period, but also to assure the entente when one of the worlds is
in movement - for instance, at one side, introduction of a new strategic plan, or, at
the other side, introduction of a new information technology. Finally, the chapter
introduces the services.
3ISWorlds
The aim of this section is to observe some main breakthrough issues that IS
researchers have created and will continue to create. In this chapter, the IS domain
is decomposed into three worlds: activities or enterprise, conceptual or informa-
tion and informatics. But these worlds cannot be isolated from each other in the IS
3 Align - to arrange in a line or so as to be parallel; to adjust (parts of a mechanism, for example)
to produce a proper relationship or orientation; to ally (oneself, for example) with one side of an
argument or cause; to adhere to a prescribed course of action; to move or be adjusted into proper
relationship or orientation ( http://www.thefreedictionary.com/align ).