Organisational Semiotics for Co-Design of Business and IT Systems

Kecheng Liu

University of Reading, Reading, UK

K.Liu@reading.ac.uk

Abstract: There is often a tension between IT and business systems, because of the changing business requirements.

An IT system, that at one time may be highly supportive, after some time, could become inadequate to

business operations and be regarded as a legacy system. Such a problem may be caused by a number of

factors. One is that IT systems and business processes are not treated as one integral unit; and therefore the

misalignment between the business and IT systems may occur. Calibration and alignment of IT and business

systems have to be regularly performed. Much effort in industry and academia has been made in searching

for solutions, through investigation of, e.g., flexible architecture of IT systems, evolutionary information

systems and co-evolution of IT systems and business processes. But the results have often been far from

being satisfactory. The co-design of business and IT systems introduced in the keynote is an approach

towards this direction. An IT system is viewed as a part of the business organisation, and the design of the

business organisation will derive the design of IT system, with the IT system design being a by-product. The

organic integration of IT into the business processes will allow both systems to evolve naturally. The co-

design approach from the perspective of organisational semiotics in this talk will be presented as a

methodological foundation for modelling the business organisation. An organisation is analysed and

modelled as the informal, formal and automated components which interact and support each other.

Modelling the organisation will involve the solicitation and representation of the norms that govern the

behaviour in each part. The presentation of this method of co-design will be followed by an illustration of

the method applied in integrating the healthcare enterprise, with a discussion on future research.

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

Professor Kecheng Liu, Fellow of the British

Computer Society, holds a professorial chair of

Applied Informatics at the University of Reading,

UK. He is Director of Informatics Research Centre,

and Head of School of Business Informatics,

Systems and Accounting, a constituent school within

Henley Business School. He has published 14 books

and over 200 papers in the fields of business

informatics. As a key international figure in business

informatics and organisational semiotics, he was one

of the founders and also the chair of a series of

international workshops and conferences on

Informatics and Semiotics in Organisations. His

research interests span from information systems

methodology, requirements engineering, pervasive

informatics, intelligent systems enabling sustainable

working and living, information management in

healthcare and, recently, pragmatic web. He has

supervised 50 PhD students spreading in many

countries and regions such as Chile, Brazil, The

Netherlands, Portugal, Saudi Arab, Iran, Singapore,

Hong Kong, China and the UK. He has been visiting

professor in a number of prestigious Chinese

Universities, including Renmin, Beijing Institute of

Technology, and Shanghai University of Finance

and Economics.

Liu K.

Smartness and the Power Grid: An Information Systems Perspective.

DOI: 10.5220/0004773300030003

In Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2013), page 3

ISBN: 978-989-8565-56-3