Towards a Human Oriented Approach to Information

Systems Development

José Cordeiro

, Joaquim Filipe

and Kecheng Liu

EST Setúbal/IPS, Rua do Vale de Chaves, Estefanilha

2910-761 Setúbal, Portugal

j.cordeiro@computer.org, j.filipe@est.ips.pt

The University of Reading, Informatics Research Centre, Whiteknights

Reading, RG6 6AF, U.K.

k.liu@reading.ac.uk

Abstract. Current approaches to information systems (IS) are roughly based on

technical, scientific or formal aspects which miss the human nature of IS or,

otherwise in organisational and social aspects highlighting the human but

missing concrete implementations. This result too often in IS failures. We think

the problem relies in an inadequate paradigm to deal with the human element

and we propose a new philosophical stance – human relativism – to overcome

the problems felt. This new approach will lead to a new way of developing IS

that will be human centred. In this sense we propose also as a possible way to

apply this new paradigm a human action oriented perspective that could be used

for information systems development. Therefore, human-action is analysed as

well and a comprehensive multi-dimensional holistic view of it is given,

followed by a particular choice of a selected group of dimensions suggested for

use in information system development according to human relativism.

Keywords. Information systems, Information systems development,

Information systems approaches and paradigms, Human-centred information

systems, Human relativism.

1 Introduction

Nowadays computerised information systems are increasingly integrating all kinds of

business and organisations and becoming an essential element of modern societies. In

order to develop these systems the information system development (ISD) field

proposes different methodologies, methods and techniques with the goal of providing

processes and information to organisations and their members by using information

and communication technologies. Most of the methodologies in ISD are originated

from computer science and software engineering and are technically oriented

emphasizing computer and formal aspects of IS. In this sense they are commonly

grouped and known as “hard approaches” to ISD [1]. On the other hand there is

another group of methodologies known as “soft approaches” that intend to highlight

the social and organisational aspects of ISD by giving the primary role to humans.

These methodologies can also be called socio-technical approaches to ISD although

these last terms are usually connoted to the ETHICS methodology [2] in particular. A

Cordeiro J., Filipe J. and Liu K.

Towards a Human Oriented Approach to Information Systems Development.

DOI: 10.5220/0004462900170029

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Enterprise Systems and Technology (I-WEST 2009), pages 17-29

ISBN: 978-989-674-015-3

problem that has been around ISD for a long time is that of information systems (IS)

failure (see [3] for an overview). Many developed IS and computer systems in

particular fail to meet their goals by taking too much time to develop, to be over

budget, to be unreliable, to provoke user dissatisfaction, to not meet the requirements,

to be difficult to maintain, etc. In spite the many existent methodologies none of them

has proof effectiveness to avoid failures. In fact soft approaches were mainly attempts

to overcome the problems felt with the dominant technical approaches that forget the

human nature of IS understood as the main reason for failure. The inability of

handling the human factor, many times ignored by traditional technical methodologies

is in our opinion the relevant reason for most failures. Scientific and objective

methods are effective in many domains where predictability, repetitiveness, and

stability are present but fail in IS where unpredictable, unique and variable human

behaviour is mixed with technical computer systems. The picture today is that “hard

approaches” to ISD are still dominant and “soft approaches” that promised to develop

better systems didn’t achieve the desired acceptance and adoption. We think that the

problems felt are originated at higher levels, namely the guiding paradigms of both

approaches and we propose a new way of looking to information systems and perhaps

to technology in general whenever human behaviour is present that is supported by a

new philosophical stance – Human Relativism - that takes the human as the central

element. This stance originates a new approach to ISD that is human-oriented and

seeks to acknowledge properly the role of humans in IS and ISD.

This paper is organised as follows: section 2 presents most common philosophical

stances in IS, section 3 criticises the use of these philosophical stances in ISD and

proposes a new philosophical stance for IS: Human Relativism. In section 4 it is

shown how we may apply in practice this new paradigm and move towards real

human-oriented IS. Section 5 presents related work and, finally, section 6 presents the

conclusions and the work being done and planned.

2 Philosophical Basis of Information Systems

2.1 The Nature of Information

The concept of information is at the core of information systems. It is symptomatic to

find that this concept has many different meanings within the IS community. For

example:

“Is data that has been processed or interpreted within a particular context to inform

or reduce uncertainty” [4].

“A collection of symbols which has the potential to alter the cognitive state of a

decision maker” [5].

“What remains after one abstracts from the material aspects of physical reality” [6].

“A numerical measure of the uncertainty of an outcome” [7].

“Is the meaning someone assigns to data” [8].

Besides information there are many other terms that are not clearly defined and

generally understood. Key terms like knowledge, communication, meaning, truth,

etc., may have different interpretations for different groups of people. The relative

importance of this subject matter is recognized by the International Federation for

Information Processing (IFIP) and particularly the FRISCO task group within work

group 8.1 on Design and Evaluation of Information Systems that declared in their

manifesto (cited in [9]):

"There is a growing concern within IFIP WG 8.1 about the present situation,

where too many fuzzy or ill-defined concepts are used in the information system area.

Scientific as well as practice-related communication is severely distorted and

hampered, due to this fuzziness and due to the frequent situation that different

communication partners associate different meanings with one and the same term.

There is no commonly accepted conceptual reference and terminology, to be applied

for defining or explaining existing or new concepts for information systems".

This difficulty to clearly define some important terms should be emphasized as it

is fundamental for the understanding, application and evolution of a successful

methodology in IS development. We need to understand the problems and difficulties

that prevent us to define a precise and consensual vocabulary needed to support and

ground any methodology. There is a close relationship between information and

reality or, in other words, ontology. Ontology, epistemology and other underlying

paradigms usually followed by the different IS approaches will be analysed next

2.2 Typical Information Systems Philosophical Stances

Hard approaches to ISD are many times connoted with an objectivist view of the

world where reality exists independent of the human being, his perception or his

consciousness. This real world is populated with objects, facts, allowing everyone to

discover them and check their validity or truth. Creating a model of this world is

straight forward implying the creation of a simple mapping connecting concepts to

real things. This is the world of natural sciences where the laws of nature rules the

world and all the happenings can be scientifically explained, predicted and governed

by a general theory. Related philosophical stances include realism from ontology, and

positivism from epistemology.

Within Information Systems, many researchers, especially those connected with the

soft approaches don’t feel comfortable with this objectivistic view. Whenever people

are involved objectivity seems to be lost. Human concerns such as goals, intentions,

commitments, responsibilities, values, attitudes and many others cannot be clearly

identified, defined or represented. Existence is not just a true/false question and

involves human interpretation, judgement and negotiation. Human behaviour cannot

be accurately predicted. For these researchers, a better perspective should be

intrinsically social and, according to them, the best philosophical stance is the

constructivist view. For constructivists reality and knowledge are socially constructed.

Individuals take the leading role in actively constructing reality rather than passively

acquiring it from the environment. In this process previous experience and knowledge

are essential means for creating new knowledge. Constructivists don’t deny

completely an objective reality but assume the existence of different personal realities

from which it won’t be possible to be sure about the existence of an independent

reality. This view seems appropriate because important elements of human

Fig. 1. Information System Development Paradigms ([10]).

information systems such as meanings, commitments, goals, and many others are

understood as social achievements submitted to negotiation and acceptance.

Constructivism can also be related to subjectivism which delegate the primacy to the

subjective experiences and reality is seem as created by perception.

Other philosophical stances appear in the IS literature, an example is [10], [11] that

proposed four paradigms for IS development. These paradigms were obtained by

splitting a plane in two dimensions: an objectivist-subjectivist dimension and an

order-conflict dimension (Figure 1). The first dimension deals with an objectivist

view of the world from which models and methods of natural science were applied to

the study of human affairs and an opposite subjectivist view which is concerned to

understand the basis of human life from the subjective experience of individuals. In

the second dimension the opposite views are, first an order or integrationist view

emphasizing a social world characterized by order, stability, integration, consensus

and functional coordination and second, a conflict or coercion view stressing change,

conflict, disintegration, and coercion [11]. The resulting four divisions are related to

four different paradigms namely: Functionalism, Social Relativism, Radical

Structuralism and Neohumanism. Each of these paradigms has an embedded

philosophical stance about knowledge (Epistemic) and existence (Ontological). The

philosophical stances for each paradigm are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Philosophical stances of the 4-paradigm for ISD from Hirschheim and Klein.

Paradigm Epistemic stance Ontological stance

Functionalism

Positivism Realism

Social Relativism

Anti-positivism Social Constructivism

Radical

Structuralism

Positivism/materialism Realism

Neohumanism

Positivism (in technical control)

and anti-positivism (in mutual

understanding and emancipation)

Realism (technical interests)

and Social Constructivism

(mutual understanding and

emancipation)

3 A New Paradigm for Information Systems – Human Relativism

3.1 Issues in Common Information Systems Philosophical Stances

All philosophical stances presented in the previous section have their own ‘truth’ and

all of them are defendable and useful in different situations.

The objectivist view proofed to be useful to science and technology in which

theories and knowledge obtained from the analysis of an objective reality permit to

explain and predict that reality in many useful ways. It should be noted that the

elements analysed by science usually exhibit a repetitive, reproducible and/or

predictable behaviour that can be observed and stated with accuracy without

ambiguity or differences in interpretation. This is not usually the case in organizations

where there are many elements that cannot be easily predicted (such as human

behaviour) or stated clearly (such as information). In fact elements like human

behaviour are highly dependent on individuals, on their knowledge, experience,

mood, values. Also information expressed by language and all the terms used to

represent and communicate the organizational reality are not possible to state

accurately and are dependent on individual perceptions, interpretations, knowledge,

judgement, experience, etc. This information and interpretation dependence on

individuals can be seen as another form of dependency on human behaviour. Humans

are responsible for the perception, interpretation and communication processes. Any

misunderstandings occurring between humans are relative to them and are part of

their behaviour. Constructivism acknowledges these evidences and is supposed to

deal with this social and human dependence by adopting a view of an organizational

shared reality in constant construction by its members where meanings came from

negotiation and agreement. Although a better approach, constructivism is again

difficult to apply, the dependence on each situation and the myriad of possible

interpretations and behaviours makes it too hard to generalize, to define or to create

reproducible and applicable theories. Moreover, constructivism misses the rigor of

science to deal with the predictable and precise aspects of the organizational reality.

To overcome these problems a new philosophical stance is needed.

3.2 Human Relativism

In this paper we propose a new philosophical stance – human relativism – with the

goal of giving a different perspective of the world by acknowledging the power of the

different views described before and by permitting to use formal methods and theories

without the errors and assumptions of most objectivist stances.

One fundamental problem with all previous approaches is the unpredictable

behaviour usually originated or related to the human element. This behaviour includes

most inter subjective experiences such as interpretation, knowledge, beliefs,

intentions, values, etc, which stand hidden from our senses. Scientific methods and

objectivism are unable to deal with human behaviour in general; it is not possible to

reproduce or predict things like interpretation or understanding or to regulate

mechanically human actions. These are heavily human dependent. On the other hand

IS reality, according to the adopted perspective is essentially human centred.

Everything an organization is or does is for people through people. Therefore using

scientific methods in organizational activities seems to be wrong. But, a nearer look

will show us that all human kind and their achievements also live in organizational

structures and may be seen from an IS perspective. Even in science itself we

acknowledge the presence of individuals and organizations behind all scientific

discovers and theories. This increases the importance of a successful IS modelling and

development. But, a question remains, how can we take advantage of the power and

success of scientific and technical approaches in the IS field? The solution, seems to

be first to acknowledge the human centeredness and its unpredictable behaviour.

Human relativism recognizes this human centrality in all human activities by

acknowledging an objective reality as human relative. There are many evidences of

this human relative view even in objectivitism. As an example everything we see

using our eyes, according to science and to our experience and beliefs, is particular to

human kind. Our vision is limited to a range of frequencies from the electromagnetic

spectrum denominated the visible spectrum. Science gave us the possibility to see

images translated from different ranges of frequencies such as infrareds. The visible

images transformed from infrareds into the visible spectrum allow us to experience a

different reality where human bodies cannot be easily separated from the

environment, because there are no clear boundaries. However, this reality is in fact

seen and experienced by some animal species as science proofs. In this sense we may

question ourselves, which is the real reality, the reality we observe with our vision or

the reality observed using, for instance, the infrared spectrum? Or, are they different

views of the same reality? There is no claim in human relativism that the reality we

see is the real reality, neither an explanation nor sense of what a real reality is. The

solution is more a practical solution – this is the reality we have, we experience and

we share. By assuming the human at the centre we also assume and accept his view as

bounded, focused and particular.

Besides persons, IS and organisations also includes information and this is once

again human related. Information is extracted by humans from the reality using

perception and interpretation processes. The distinction between perceptions, the

process of acknowledging the external reality through our senses, and interpretation,

the meaning making process, is a useful way to help understanding the nature of

information and its acquisition process. Only information goes through an

interpretation process, the other elements of the (human) reality are just perceived. In

fact, perception filters part of the human reality accessible to a particular individual.

To perceive does not mean to interpret and this separation allow us to understand

what is observable. Usually, observability concerns what we think a human being is

able to percept or to acquire through his senses. This excludes the interpretation

process and information as well. Usually information is not observable but it can be

extracted from observable things. Observable things can be viewed as material or

physical things from the objectivist view. As an example happiness is not an

observable thing although it may be expressed by a smile, an observable thing itself.

On the other hand we cannot derive happiness from a simple smile in a general way.

This will be subjected to interpretation and may have different results depending on

people. This leads to the problem of divergent interpretations, one of the most

fundamental problems of IS, that is in the basis of the difficulties of applying

scientific approaches to IS. To solve this ambiguity or meaning problem the

observability concept described is a first step to reach consensus. So, human

relativism makes the following assumption:

Assumption: Anything that is observable will be more appropriate to be used by

scientific methods.

Nevertheless we need a second step to recognize the elements that can be used

without problems by scientific methods. The notion of precision in Human

Relativism will deal with this issue.

To achieve a high degree of precision we need to remove ambiguities and

different meanings from any term or information making it generally accepted,

recognized and shared. This doesn’t mean to make everyone agree on it based on

negotiation as in the case of constructivism. The solution goes by adopting a kind of

operational meaning or human observable independence that makes it clear and

precise. Human observable independence is achieved if everyone is able to interpret

in the (apparently) same way. It may be necessary to have previous knowledge to

reach this shared and accepted interpretation. One way of achieving precision is by

using physical measurement. It is simple to say (to be precise) if a specific string has

or hasn’t one meter of length. Some people could argue about this but without

relevance for scientific purposes where it would be used without ambiguities in some

technical system.

If it would be possible to measure the precision degree of each term we would be

able to assign each term a different value. Surely the elements analysed and used by

science, the physical things less correlated with human interpretation would achieve a

higher precision value. Concepts are generally difficult to be precise; they are the

result of human creation and therefore much human dependent. Therefore they have

to be treated with special attention in order to make them or to select them as precise

as possible.

The Human Relativistic Hypothesis is:

By adopting high precision observable elements under a human relativistic view it

may be possible to derive a scientific and theoretical well founded approach to IS.

A second hypothesis to be drawn is that:

The human behaviour problem in IS (or in other fields) can be overtaken in

technical approaches if it is recognized clearly.

Finally, a last hypothesis is:

We may freely apply technical approaches if there is no unpredictable behaviour

present, specifically human behaviour.

4 Using Human Relativism in Information Systems as a Guiding

Paradigm

4.1 The Human Action Perspective

Human relativism (HR) point us a way to overcome the difficulty of dealing with

unpredictable behaviour, in particular human behaviour that is central to IS. When we

think of human behaviour we realize that we just have access to its observable part –

the (observable) human actions. In effect human behaviour is expressed or

externalised through human actions. Therefore, according to HR we should

acknowledge the power and the unpredictability of human action (and human

behaviour) to be able to design more powerful and robust IS. One way to achieve this

is to reduce the dependability of the IS in human behaviour but in this case we would

be limiting and reducing the power of the IS as well. A complementary or alternative

approach is to use efficiently its power by creating the necessary tools and provide

support to human action. This approach will permit to extend human capabilities by

using information technologies as specialised tools facilitating, improving, expanding

and complementing human action thus allowing the human to express its creative

power without expecting a mechanical behaviour from him. In order to achieve this

goal a deeper understanding of human behaviour in general and human actions in

particular is required.

4.2 Human Action Holistic View

Because HR is a new guiding paradigm, an analysis concerning observable human

actions as part of the human behaviour in IS cannot be found in current IS literature.

Therefore, to have an initial understanding of the multiple aspects related to human

action and IS a detailed empirical analysis was undertaken. Our goal was to have a

multi-dimensional holistic view trying to cover all important aspects connected to

human action that would help us to define the key dimensions following HR. A first

identification and categorization of the dimensions related to human actions was

obtained by applying the common questions framework (CQF) proposed in [12]. The

CQF was originally used to compare different modelling techniques according to

typical comparison dimensions such as organisational, functional, behavioural,

temporal, contextual, and motivational dimensions. These dimensions can be related

to some common sense questions used to enquire about some fact or subject, these are

the who, what, which, how, when, where, with and why questions, thus the name

used.

Applying the CQF to human actions (HA) we identified the following 8 dimensions

as shown in Figure 2:

Fig. 2. Human action dimensions identified by the Common Questions Framework.

1. Organisational (who) – The “who” applied to HA refer to its performer, not to

the organisational hierarchy or power structures as originally used to.

2. Motivational (why) – Regarding motivation, important aspects related to HA

and human behaviour such as interests, goals, intentions, purposes, objectives,

and aims are addressed in this dimension.

3. Temporal (when) – The temporal dimension deals with time aspects of action

such as duration, start and finish times.

4. Contextual (where) – Context is about the location and the surrounding

environment where the action take place. Given our holistic purposes we

should extend this dimension to include cultural, political, organisational and

other social contexts.

5. Resources (with) – Resources are physical things that are consumed, used or

transformed by the HA, they may include, tools, instruments, materials or

documents.

6. Behavioural (how) – In the behavioural dimension we will be concerned in the

detail of the HA execution, involving the use of tools and other resources, the

relations to other actions and so on.

7. Conceptual (which) – This dimension concerns the identification of concepts

related to HA. Usually this is a very subjective dimension using mostly non-

observable elements and perhaps not useful for objective purposes.

8. Functional (what) – The functional dimension covers the group of actions

available without entering in the detail of each one.

In spite of most important dimensions covered by the application of the CQF there is

still space to add more dimensions. So, in Figure 3 we provide an augmented view of

HA that includes new dimensions in order to form a comprehensive view. From this

view other aspects related to HA are added and considered, namely: constraints and

rules, pre and post conditions for actions, physical and social measurements or

valuations, monitoring, including verification and validation, relationships with other

action and triggers for actions. Of course not all of them are to be used for ISD but

this list is useful for a complete analysis of human action and for deriving a better

support for it in IS.

Fig. 3. Human action - a holistic multi-dimensional view.

4.3 Human Action Dimensions for Information Systems Development

In the previous holistic view of human action some of the dimensions may overlap

and may not be suited for practical ISD. On the other hand regarding HR,

observability establishes what can be used without much ambiguity. From this

perspective, as observers we are just able to easily identify physical things such as HA

performers, all kind of involved physical artefacts and the surrounding physical

context. The informational aspects remain hidden because they are particular to each

individual after perception and interpretation. In fact, we should understand

information as non-observable and provide a separate dimension exclusive for it.

Thus, from a practical (and observable) point of view we selected and purpose a

group of five essential dimensions as follows:

1. Information dimension – joins most non-material aspects of human action such

as the why, how, when and where dimensions plus other aspects such as cost,

quality, verification, validation, etc. It is a key dimension for IS analysis and

design

2. Communicational dimension – captures the links and exchange of information

between humans. A communication can be seen as exchanges of speech-acts,

also a speech act is effectively a kind of non-material human act that

corresponds to an observable human action.

3. Material dimension – joins all the material aspects involved in human action

except for the human performers. It is the with dimension

4. Human dimension – this must be a separate dimension because of the

relevance of the human actor within the human relativist view. The human

dimension is concerned about the humans involved in human actions.

5. Context dimension – In order to enable any kind of human action it is

necessary that the environment afford us that action. The state of the

environment that enables that human action provides the necessary context.

Although other choices may be done, these group of dimensions seems to us

fundamental for IS analysis and goes with our goals to integrate some soft approaches

to ISD in a new approach that intends to be more effective and succsseful than current

ones.

5 Related Work

Within IS there are different attempts to escape from traditional ISD towards human-

centred or human-oriented ISD. Nurminen, considered the father of the humanistic

approach for ISD proposed in [13] this alternative perspective contrasted to the

current systems-theoretical and socio-technical approaches, roughly related to the

hard and soft approaches mentioned at the introduction. His perspective shares our

understanding of information technology as an auxiliary tool and the emphasis in

human beings, human needs and human activities. Much of his considerations are

quite valuable but he doesn’t really give us an effective solution for ISD and doesn’t

root his ideas in strong philosophical foundations. A good analysis of human-

centeredness in ISD can be found in [14], where the trend towards a human-centred

solution is clearly found in ISD. Starting with early hard approaches that ignored

many human aspects, and going through participative solutions where the user is

included in the design process, through end-user computing leaving to the user the

tailoring of the system according to his needs, through prototyping expecting the user

to collaborate actively in the interactive aspects of the final application and ending in

actual combinations of methods originated in human-computer interaction (HCI) and

computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) fields in ISD. Still, as the authors

argued, there is “...a lack of a holistic picture of how the users should be studied or

considered in ISD, or what should be their role there”. In another article - [15] - user-

centeredness in ISD is studied as a multidimensional concept along the following four

dimensions: 1) as user focus, 2) as work centeredness, 3) as user participation and 4)

as system personalization. Again in the conclusions the authors posed the question

whether any of the user centred design approaches analysed forms a systems

development approach by itself. The answer was not clear with many aspects being

considered revealing the absence of a real human-oriented approach to ISD.

6 Conclusions, Present and Future Work

In this paper a new paradigm for information systems – Human relativism - was

introduced. Human Relativism shows a new way to look into information systems that

acknowledges the human nature of it and provides the essential basis for a well

founded technical approach. In this sense a possible direction in how to apply this

new paradigm by focusing the analysis of IS within a human action perspective is

provided. Besides a holistic view of human action according to a comprehensive set

of dimensions, also a selected group of important dimensions is proposed for use in

ISD. In fact, this perspective is part of our current work where a new modelling

language – NOMIS - was developed allowing analysing and model any IS according

to a coherent set of views along each of the dimension proposed. These views are

aligned with three theories that are integrated in NOMIS namely the Theory of

Organized Activity ( [16]), Organisational Semiotics (see [17]) and the Language

Action Perspective (in [18] and [19]). NOMIS by following Human Relativism and

using the views mentioned before defines a new form of business process modelling

closer to the organisational reality. As future work we plan to test this approach in an

e-learning application prototype already developed and we intend to apply, use it, test

it and evaluate it in some other different experimental projects before it is released.

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