ORGANISATIONAL SEMIOTICS EMBEDDED IN A SYSTEM
DEVELOPMENT CYCLE
A Case Study in a Business Organisation
Carlos Alberto Cocozza Simoni, M. Cecília C. Baranauskas
Institute of Computing, - State University of Campinas, Caixa Postal 6176, 13083-970, Campinas, Brazil
Keywords: Organisational Semiotics, Software Eng
ineering, Human – Computer Interaction.
Abstract: Searching for competitiveness and excellence in quality, business companies have revisited their processes
generating new demands for the Information Technology (IT) department, involving knowledge that goes
beyond the software development itself: understanding the organisation, its processes and businesses as a
whole. Regarding software development methods, we have perceived significant advances in the technical
aspects of software development lately; but the same attention had not been directed to the domain analysis
which could have serious consequences in the applications and in the company. As a way to contribute in
this direction we have investigated the use of Organisational Semiotics in real contexts of systems
development. A case study discussed in this paper involves the use of this theoretical basis in a real work
situation for evaluation purposes.
1 INTRODUCTION
Literature has shown that requirements specification
and its validation are determinants of the success of
the information systems development (Ehn and
Lowgren, 1997 and Liu, 2000). When we deal with
organisational changes, it is vital to line up the IT
solution with the business objectives and necessities.
Thus, the success of a computer-based system in
supporting the organisational changes will require
the agreement of stakeholders, users, developers etc.
on business, processes and technical questions as
well. Moreover, the social, cultural and
organisational aspects of the problem must have a
more decisive role in the development processes,
than the technology itself.
In this paper, we will present and discuss the
i
ntroduction of a new process of information system
development, based on the Organisational Semiotics,
in the Information Technology (IT) department of a
particular organisation. The work adopted a
qualitative approach and the techniques selected
were participative observation, interview, fieldwork
and notes taken during the process (Simoni and
Baranauskas, 2003a). The meetings were recorded
and revised by the participants.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2
briefly
presents the theoretical basis for our work:
Organisational Semiotics and MEASUR methods.
Section 3 briefly describes and discusses the case
study and present results achieved during the
activities and Section 4 concludes.
2 THEORETICAL BASIS
Organisational Semiotics (OS) is the study of
organisations using concepts and methods from
Semiotics (OSW 1995). The rationale for OS is
based on the assumption that any organized
behaviour is affected by the communication and
interpretation of signs by people, individually or in
groups.
An organisation can be seen as an information
syste
m in which interdependent links between the
organisation, the business process and the IT system
occur (Liu 2000). At an informal level there is a sub-
culture where meanings are established, intentions
are understood, beliefs are formed and commitments
with responsibilities are made, altered and
discharged. At a formal level form and rule replace
meaning and intention. At a technical level part of
the formal system is automated by a computer-based
system. The informal level embeds the formal that,
in turn, embeds the technical level, meaning that
changes in any level reflect in others.
519
Alberto Cocozza Simoni C. and Cecília C. Baranauskas M. (2004).
ORGANISATIONAL SEMIOTICS EMBEDDED IN A SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT CYCLE - A Case Study in a Business Organisation.
In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 519-522
DOI: 10.5220/0002637205190522
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

Organisational Semiotics and the Information
System Development
We see in OS a basis to cover the gap we find in
traditional system development methodologies,
related to studies of organisation, their values and
behaviour. It is agreed that OS methods allow the
interested parts of a focal problem a better
understanding of their requirements and intentions,
as well as restrictions of the information system (Liu
2000).
We have considered the Stamper’s MEASUR
(Methods for Eliciting, Analysing and Specifying
Users’ Requirements). Stamper (1993) proposed a
set of methods to deal with all aspects of information
system design, which are concerned with the use of
signs, their function in communicating meanings and
intentions, and their social consequences.
3 A SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
PROCESS INFORMED BY
ORGANISATIONAL
SEMIOTICS: A CASE STUDY
The case study discussed in this section was
conducted at Gradiente, a Brazilian company that
produce technological solutions for electronic
consumer goods. The partnership established with
Gradiente occurred at a moment when they were
reorganizing their IT department. We made an
agreement of partnership that, briefly, involved the
following steps: a) to understand the expectations
related to our proposal; b) to adapt a training
programme to their possibilities; c) to train in the
new approach; d) support the documentation; e) to
supervise a pilot development; f) to evaluate the case
study and g) to review of development process
documentation.
Figure 1: The system development cycle with
MEASUR methods.
Figure 1 shows the result achieved by integrating
the Gradiente development process with
Organisational Semiotics, and the MEASUR
methods.
The development process was organized into
phases, of iterative development, in a way that the
Planning and the Analysis were based on MEASUR
and the Design and Implementation were based on
Unified Process and UML.
In the next sections we present the development
of an application based on this process, discuss the
achievements, and present some feedback got during
the process.
3.1 The Enterprise Resource
Management (ERM) Application
The application to be the first pilot project for
evaluation of the new Development Process
involved the enterprise resource management (ERM)
that initially would deal with IT resources.
The work was carried on sessions of 3 hours/day
for meetings with the user representatives and one
day/week for work evaluation to consolidate the
results and pendencies. In the next sessions we
discuss the accomplished work, according to the
established development process.
3.1.1 The Planning Phase
The process has started with a meeting with the IT
manager, for problem understanding. Another
meeting with the responsibles for IT was carried out
to define the role that each participant would have in
the project. In the sequence, we started with the
MEASUR methods as shown by Figure 2.
Figure 2: The First Draft outcomes.
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520

PAM – Problem Articulation Methods
Stakeholder Analysis helps in identification of
the interested parts in the focal problem. The team
considered that all the Gradiente employees are
potentially involved in the process, because they
consume IT resources. All the managers, in a near
future, and more immediately the IT managers
constituted the parts that would use the information
to manage their respective departments. During the
analysis, they realize that the participation of all
involved persons was significant in the process.
The participants reported that they had discussed
aspects that usually would not have been discussed
in the normal process. For example, verifying that
the service suppliers (Telefônica, Xerox etc.) could
be affected by the project, as revisions of contracts
could occur.
Evaluation Framing is used to identify, for each
stakeholder, which would be its interests, questions
and problems, to discuss possible solutions.
We could observe that the group compared
Gradiente’s reality/necessity with the Market
practice, not only regarding prices, but also the cost /
benefit evaluation for each resource. This was an
aspect that they reported not usually discussed in
their previous practice.
Semiotic Framework allows the analyst to
expand his analyse beyond technical issues, placing
the IT solution among other possible solutions to the
organisational questions, discussing with the
stakeholders other level of relationship (physical,
empirics, syntactic, semantics, pragmatic and social)
which direct or indirectly affect the project.
Anthropologic Framework aims to verifying, for
each stakeholder, problems in the process and the
important conditions and questions to be addressed,
regarding interaction, association, subsistence,
taxonomy, time, space, learning, creativity, defence
and exploitation aspects.
Collateral Analysis allows the analyst to
investigate many components of the entire project,
which could impact costs, schedule and the success
of the project if not treated in an adequate moment.
After working with PAM, they get involved in
the elaboration of the solution proposal.
Based on the informal, formal and technical
layers of the Gradiente’s organisation, a discussion
was conducted to review the IT situation in the
organization. They were in a transition from an
informal Information System to a formal one. They
realized that they had to consider the informal
system, understanding and reorganizing it from new
IT goals and mission; otherwise they would have the
system supporting practices and processes that
would not exist in the near future.
From this discussion, they agreed that the
continuity of the ERM project was possible, and that
they had the information needed for modelling. They
had also an expectation that the new approach for
analysis could assist them in getting a more generic
model of IT resources management.
3.1.2 The Development / Analysis Phase
This phase was initiated with a meeting to revise the
schedule and the role of each participant (Figure 3).
SAM - Semantic Analysis and NAM – Norm
Analysis
During the analysis of the Proposal they initiated the
identification of some norms and realized that it
would be interesting to record them. Although
literature (Liu, 2000) places the two analyses
separately, this approach, presented good results,
strengthening the characterization and definition of
each semantic element.
Figure 3: The Analysis outcomes.
As the number of discovered semantic units
grew, the group felt the necessity of having the
graphical visualization of the relationship among the
units. They started to create the Ontology Diagram
(OD) and represent Norms on it. This process
demanded periodic revisions in the diagram, but it
also revealed itself strong in terms of provoking
more discussion about the context being modelled.
We observed that the level of abstraction
represented in the model enabled them to go beyond
discussion on IT resources management. This level
of abstraction was a very important result, because
this difficulty had been pointed out in studies carried
out previously (Simoni and Baranauskas, 2003b).
ORGANISATIONAL SEMIOTICS EMBEDDED IN A SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT CYCLE: A CASE STUDY IN A
BUSINESS ORGANISATION
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For the Norm Analysis, the process involved to
verify, for each diagram element, whether it would
have norms associated. The process was finished
with a revision on the Proposal document.
The last two sessions of the Analysis phase were
dedicated to the elaboration of the user interface
prototypes and data structure. We observed that the
transposition was done directly from OD elements to
the corresponding screen elements, as mentioned in
previous work (Simoni and Baranaukas, 2003b). We
verified that OD contributed to the interface
organization into menus, screens and information to
be entered and visualized. Prototyping contributed
also to the validation of Semantic and Norm
Analysis, as the prototypes reflect the
materialization of the model and refinements on it.
3.2 Highlight of Results
As a practical work in a real company, we could
effectively test the potentiality of the proposed
approach. The choice for an IT internal project with
medium complexity allowed us to work with low
pressure of schedule, facilitating the revisions and
experimentation that were necessary. During the
process, we could observe the expectations and
results reached with new approach, illustrated below
in their comments.
“... It is based on the way communication is
carried through, clarity of meanings, etc.
(Semiotics). Normally we have difficulty to
communicate with non technical people and use
technical terms”.
With the discussion occurred by the end of the
Planning phase, we understood that they accepted
the approach and that it added value to their
development process, mainly in the activities of
requirements eliciting, one of our research focus.
“We are leaving a situation in which we make
the thing and think about it later. When the process
finishes we realize that it could have been done in a
different way”. “If we think earlier we don’t make
many mistakes”.
By the end of the Analysis phase, we observed
that the methods had been well assimilated and had
brought an improvement in their process of
understanding the problem and its context. In a
different way that they use to work, the new
approach led the group to discussions beyond the
technical questions:
“After the training I didn’t feel confident. The
confidence came with the practical works... The
documentation is complete, with a sequence that
allows to have a problem definition and
documentation of its context”.
By establishing the Solution Proposal as a
document that links the Planning and the Analysis
we covered the gap that we had observed in other
case studies (Simoni e Baranaukas, 2003b).
The outcomes of this case study allows us to say
that it was viable to introduce the concepts and
methods of the Organisational Semiotics into a
system development cycle that, according to
comments and observations, generated an adequate
documentation in volume and content, treated the
department of information system as a whole,
including the technical system.
4 CONCLUSION
Studies in user requirement eliciting need to address
how people understand the world and how to
represent this understanding.
The results of the case studies suggest that the
involved people had good understanding of the
approach, which allowed them to practice the
methods proposed by Organisational Semiotics and
MEASUR (PAM, SAM and NAM), mapping
elements of the analysis to interface prototypes and
data base.
Finally, the work that was initiated in the
company continues, to verify the influence of the
approach in the quality of the software application,
and brings us the perspective of new projects in
partnership.
REFERENCES
Ehn, P., Lowgren, J. (1997), Design for Quality-in-use:
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OSW (1995), The circulation document. Organisational
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Organizacional”, MSc. Thesis (in Portuguese),
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