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Furthermore, this decomposition of the IS world also shows the impacts of
worlds on the IS conceptual world and reciprocally the impacts of the conceptual
world on them.
4 Services
Many observations reveal a great change in the domain of information systems in
firms and even in Society. Of course, information systems are widespread every-
where in the Society. In the enterprises, IS become larger and larger and its
management becomes more and more difficult and imprecise. The whole IS archi-
tecture became obscure, only IS parts or aspects can be well described. Furthermore,
we can observe for instance, that the domain of information technologies (IT) deliv-
ers more and more new systems, platforms, which are very interesting for IS, that IS
becomes a real challenge at the strategic level of firms, and that a great number of
persons are convinced that their professional future is in this direction even if they
do not have IS skills.
In this section we present our understanding of this deep emerging transforma-
tion. First, IS can be decomposed into IS components. Second, the power of IS
development will be distributed in terms of initiatives. Third, the conceptual world
will be the hinge of trans-disciplinary efforts. Fourth, value becomes the central
question, cost comes just after. Finally, the concept of service emerges from the IS
domain and it has the potential to be the kernel of a real Science.
4.1 IS Governance Through IS Components
An IS component is defined over classes, methods, integrity rules, processes, roles,
events, which constitute a semantic unit where several actors deal with the same
goals to achieve, the simple principles to observe [ 35] . It is important for this
concept to be a formal one. An IS component must verify integrity rules and conse-
quently some operations are defined over it or over several well-formed components.
The concept of hyperclass [ 34] is one option for such a formalisation.
The IS components have overlaps between them, because they are not isolated
and in particular, they share classes. In these overlaps the coordination between the
involved semantic units can be analysed [ 15] .
As a consequence, another IS perspective is to consider IS as composed of IS
components. The IS governance must assure that the IS component obtained by a
development process or an evolution process is well-formed and consistent with the
other IS components.
To summarise, the IS governance has to manage IS development in terms of
development of IS components of the given IS, which is a deep transformation in IS
development.
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