Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
INTRODUCTION
Most business problems have a number of potential solutions, some of which may prove
to be more beneficial than others. As many of these solutions may not be at first obvious,
or previously imagined, management needs to be highly creative in order to identify the best
candidate solutions. However, identification of candidate solutions may depend upon first
successfully identifying the underlying issues associated with the business problem.
Identification of these issues also requires creativity, as a full understanding of the problem
may only emerge through extensive creative discourse (e.g., through Joint Application
Development). As contemporary solutions to business problems frequently require the
development of computer-based IS, it therefore follows that creativity is important to IS
design and development. As Keegan (1998, p. 239) put it: “Today's constraining factor is not
the software, not the hardware, not the network. It is human creativity. We still need skilled,
imaginative individuals who can research a business opportunity and integrate the technol-
ogy needed to put the required process in place.”
If we accept the argument that the level of creativity applied to a business problem may
significantly impact the quality of the resulting IS, it seems reasonable to expect that students
studying systems analysis should be well-versed in the importance of creativity within the
software development process and also be skilled in applying creativity-enhancing tech-
niques. However, the authors fear that for many university courses in IS, creativity is not
emphasized, and students may therefore graduate with only a rudimentary understanding of
this important area. In this respect, the authors feel that the IS teaching community can learn
from other disciplines that also focus upon the creation of artifacts, such as architecture and
engineering. These disciplines have long acknowledged the importance of creativity by
encouraging their students to express themselves creatively, and by incorporating creative
problem solving and design techniques throughout their curricula.
We therefore argue that IT education and training should more openly acknowledge
the role and importance of creativity training and support to the successful development of
IS. We believe that training IS and IT professionals in creativity will allow them to be more
successful in their future roles as innovative professionals and business people. Moreover,
these concerns have motivated the authors to investigate the potential of an individual
creativity-enhancing technique to facilitate requirements determination.
BACKGROUND ON CREATIVITY
Defining Creativity
The literature offers diverse conceptual definitions of
creativity.
Tomas (1999), for
example, defined creativity in terms of an original idea. Synonyms used by researchers to
describe this quality may include uniqueness, surprising, novel, unusualness, innovative,
and newness (Thurstone, 1952). A more restricted definition of creativity focuses solely on
rare revolutionary and paradigm shifting ideas, while a looser definition includes useful
evolutionary contributions that refine and apply existing paradigms (Shneiderman, 2000).
The appropriateness of new ideas is also important in order to distinguish creative ideas
from surreal ideas that may be unique but have unlawful or highly unrealistic implications.
Synonyms used by researchers to describe this quality may include workable, practical,
