Information Technology Reference
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4.2 Initiatives, Value and Trans-Disciplinarity
Usually the power of IS developments in the enterprises is centralized, even if there
are always lots of unofficial developments by means, for instance, of spreadsheets.
But now the IS stakes are much closer to the professions and the analysis process
suffers from the lack of the analysts' knowledge of the encountered situations, where
IS can be efficient (the 4th dimension of shift). More and more professionals have
pertinent ideas of what kind of efficient support they need. In this new perspective,
they will have the opportunity to take initiative of new IS development, which in
fact will concern an IS component rather that the whole IS. This situation offers
several challenges. The professionals do not have sufficient IS skills. A real ques-
tion of management of initiatives will emerge: an initiative could be a false good
idea, several initiatives could be combined, all the initiatives could not be developed
because of lack of means, etc.
One main criteria of a good initiative will be the value that the realization of the
initiative will bring to the firm. The substantial approach
[9]
provides elements to
face this question. This question of value must be added to the previous overlap
between the IS activities world and the IS conceptual world.
Generally, such initiatives to create value have to be trans-disciplinary: then, the
value comes from the communication between several partners, who are in charge of
various tasks and who have different skills. The question is not only interdisciplinary
but also based on various kinds of knowledge: addition of a new IS component can
partially transform the activities of each partner and provide a new professional
environment, unknown before. To do that, one possible way is to use the concep-
tual modelling approach as a
cross-pollination space
[
37]
, where the interwoven
elements of various partners will be discussed precisely.
4.3 Service
Based on the previous reasoning, a new concept -
service -
can be introduced [
4]
.
This concept is built upon the concept of IS component with all the usual worlds
of the IS domain, but also with
value
in a prominent place and with a completely
different way of development, which lays on initiatives, agile developments, trans-
disciplinary efforts around a cross-pollination space.
The concept of
service
exists in various disciplines like Economy, Marketing and
Public Administration. Besides, it is also used in informatics with the services ori-
ented architecture. Therefore, it is perhaps wiser to use the expression of
information
service
as once suggested by Prof. Janis Bubenko Jr.
Nevertheless, the cross-pollination space needs to host people with different
skills and in particular coming from informatics. The concept of service, built on
input-output schema, is useful because a lot of services can obey this schema. Their
autonomy
can be defined easily.
But
, this kind of services is only a particular case
in the theory of services. In the more general IS situation, information services
will share classes, integrity rules, roles, events, processes. Their a
utonomy
must be
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