Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
THE COURSE OUTLINE
This is a ten-week course that typically has 20 students and is structured as 10, three-
hour sessions that have a mix of activities, including lectures, mini-lectures, seminars,
presentations, role playing, and debates. No single systems development methodology,
method, tool, or technique is emphasized, the aim of the course is to help students question
the need for the several thousand “methodologies” that exist and to develop skills in
understanding what criteria may be useful in the selection and application of the available
options to specific situations. They are also led to explore their own preferences in the
selection and use of development approaches and to reflect on how this may influence the
effectiveness of any given approach in practice.
The direction of the course is to introduce students to a range of information systems
development methodologies and to encourage them to consider how and under what
circumstances the various approaches, or combinations of them, may be usefully applied. The
teaching approach adopted assumes a “hard-soft” spectrum with the various methodolo-
gies, or their underlying philosophies, placed appropriately along that spectrum, and sets out
to explore the relative merits of the approaches for a variety of problem situations. Although
the views presented in the lectures ranged broadly across the hard and soft areas, the “soft”
were explored in more depth than the “hard,” because this was a new perspective for most
students. The ontological position of the course could be regarded as being at the nominalist
end of the realism/nominalism spectrum, and epistemologically, as leaning toward the
interpretive domain (Hirschheim & Klein, 1989).
The early part of the course was used to explore the possible meanings of the term
“methodology,” working mainly around the views of Avison and Fitzgerald (Avison &
Fitzgerald, 1995), who regarded a methodology as more than simply a collection of “proce-
dures techniques, tools and documentation aids,” in that it should have a “philosophical”
view that distinguishes it from being a method, or recipe. The current levels of “failure” in
information systems development were examined, the word “failure” being viewed from the
perspectives of the various parties typically involved in the development of human activity
systems (Sauer, 1993). A variety of readings were used to encourage students to develop
multiple views of the subject area, many of these being critical of method or methodology.
These included Floods' “consultant as parasite” and academic as potential dilettante
developer (Flood, 1995), and Wastells' “methodology as social defense” (Wastell, 1996). A
variety of Web resources were also used to introduce post-modern thinking and to introduce
a broader base of development methodologies beyond the set text. Students were required
to write short critiques of these materials as part of the assessment requirement and to be
prepared to discuss them during the seminar component of the sessions.
Although the major emphasis of this course is upon the higher-level issues relating to
development methodologies, there is, in practice, a need to connect these issues with
techniques and tools to permit implementation of real-world systems. The final sessions of
the course, therefore, introduce a variety of software tools that may be useful to support
“softer” approaches to systems development. These tools include cognitive mapping
software, repertoire grids, mind maps, electronic meeting systems, and other tools, tech-
niques, and methods that can be used to explore, elicit, and share multiple worldviews. These
are offered as tools to help move toward the development of meaningful system specifications
that can ultimately be implemented by more formal, “harder,” development approaches where
