CO-DESIGN OF AN ADAPTABLE SYSTEM FOR INFORMATION

MANAGEMENT

Kecheng Liu, Navid Karimi Sani, Shokoofeh Ketabchi and Eilish Mcloughlin

Informatics Research Center, University of Reading, Reading, U.K.

Keywords: Co-design, Adaptable information systems, Corporate asset, Organisational semiotics, Organisational onion,

Semantic analysis method, Norm analysis method.

Abstract: Information management is a discipline dealing with creation, communication, utilisation and disposal of

information. In the 21st century, the volume of information forces the organisations not only to have formal

processes for information management, but also employing effective IT systems to leverage the value of

information. This paper introduces a method for improving the process of information management and co-

design the business process and IT system to support the information management practice in organisations.

This method takes into account stakeholders’ roles and responsibilities, and their needs for information

provided by the information management processes. Adopting organisational semiotics as theoretical and

methodological foundation, the IT system designed will be adaptable to the changes of requirements due to

the changes of the business environment and stakeholders’ interest.

1 INTRODUCTION

In today’s business environment, many

organisations regard information as asset (Best,

1996; Burk and Horton, 1988; Owens et al. 1997;

Nicolls, 2002; Mathkour et al. 2005; Abdul Karim

and Hussein, 2008; Yassine and Shirmohammadi,

2008, Blazic and Saljic, 2010). Examining closely, it

can be found that most of the organisation are not

able to manage this asset in the way as other types to

maximise the value of information. The lack of

effective methods and techniques for capturing,

storing, using and disposal of the information has

constrained the organisations to benefit to the full

potential. A need for standards, policies and

techniques is clearly felt which should be able to

support the organisations to make strategic decisions

and perform business operations (Ladley, 2010).

Some organisations have some standards and

even procedures to apply manually. But the

challenging issue still remains in that a large volume

of information overloads on the users and

information system and technological support are

not capable of selecting and supplying relevant

information at the right time to the right users. Some

organisations suffer from insufficient control of

quality and processes in information management

activities. This leads to a number of risks, e.g. (i) not

knowing where the information is, who is

accountable for the quality of information, who has

access to that information; (ii) incompliance with

regulatory policies because of improper procedures

for retention and disposal of information. In

addition, knowledge and expertise cannot be shared

among different parts of the organisation due to the

lack of proper communication channels. Therefore,

organisations are not able to react to internal and

external forces and make agile decisions based on

required information.

One solution is to design the system of business

processes of information management and the IT

system to support information management activities

at the same time. In other words, a proper

information management process should consider

the business system and IT system as one integral

unit (Liu et al. 2002). Therefore, they should be

designed together and evolve seamlessly.

In this paper, the co-design of business and IT is

described as a cross organisational processes in

which people are involved from different parts of the

organisation. The co-design is seen as a continuous

process and a change in the system can be

introduced when there are changes in information

management processes. The rest of the paper is

organised as follows: a brief background on

information management (IM) and organisational

324

Liu K., Karimi Sani N., Ketabchi S. and Mcloughlin E..

CO-DESIGN OF AN ADAPTABLE SYSTEM FOR INFORMATION MANAGEMENT.

DOI: 10.5220/0003548603240332

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2011), pages 324-332

ISBN: 978-989-8425-55-3

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

semiotics (OS) are presented in section two and

three respectively. Then, a co-design method for an

adaptable information system is discussed in section

four, followed by its application in section five.

Finally, the validity of the method is discussed in

section six and paper is concluded in section seven.

2 MANAGING INFORMATION

AS A CORPORATE ASSET

Information is one of the important corporate assets.

It is essential that it is managed efficiently to meet

business needs and comply with internal policies and

external regulatory requirements. Information

management is a process which helps to achieve this

goal. Academically, IM is also a discipline which is

concerned with capturing, storing, organising,

structuring and processing relevant information

accurately and timely from many sources as well as

delivering or publishing it to relevant audience to be

used to realise their objectives (Newman and Logan,

2008).

The AIIM community introduces a set of guiding

principles for information management (AIIM,

2010), including (1) information is corporate assets

and the principles of IM should be agreed across the

organisation; (2) Information must be made

available and shared by relevant people; (3) The

retention and archiving information is managed

corporately; (4) Senior management involvement as

well as front line workers is necessary as IM is a

corporate responsibility. The guidelines also state

the importance of employee education and training

to achieve better IM practices.

However, this is not the case in many

organisations. Many do not have proper IM policies

and procedures and have not paid sufficient

attention. This may lead to some undesired

consequences. These are some examples to illustrate

such consequences. First, some companies,

according to regulatory authorities in their sectors,

are obliged to keep employees’ records for more

than twenty years. If the company did not have

proper retention policies of employees’ records, they

would not be able to produce defendable records and

evidences in the event of litigation. Therefore, they

would fail to comply with the regulatory

requirements and high legal discovery costs might

be incurred to the organisation. Secondly, as a result

of improper (or lack of) IM practice, required

information may not be shared among different parts

of the organisation. This may lead to a number of

problems; such as, no collaboration among people

and no sharing of information and knowledge in

different sections. Finally, although some

organisations have basic infrastructure and practice

for IM; the lack of effective IM processes would not

lead the realisation of the full value of the

infrastructure. For example, in our case studies, we

found that a company bought Sharepoint 2010 but

without configuring it properly to fit into its IM

processes these problems can be solved by a proper

IM practice with the support of an IT system.

Many technical systems are available and have

been adopted in industrial practice; for example,

Microsoft SharePoint, Open Text Document

management System (eDoc), Oracle Enterprise

Content Management (ECM), IBM Document

Manager, and Autonomy Record Manager.

Acquiring the best IM IT system requires an

understanding of the IM practice in the organisation

if a close fit is expected; while the maximum value

from such as technical system requires carefully

analysis and alignment of IT system functions and

IM processes in the organisation. Therefore the

organisations’ processes and activities should be

analysed before a proper IT system is bought or

developed in-house. In a survey carried out by IDC,

the fit between business and IT is mentioned as the

highest priority from business managers’ view (Ortis

and Pallares, 2007 )

. This provides a key motivation to our work in

the co-design of business and IT systems. The co-

design will also address some of the other issues

(Figure 1).

Figure 1: IM priority activities (Ortis and Pallares, 2007).

3 SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF

INFORMATION

MANAGEMENT

Organisational Semiotics (OS), the study of signs

related to organisations, facilitates designing an

integrated system and related processes to support

CO-DESIGN OF AN ADAPTABLE SYSTEM FOR INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

325

IM by considering an organisation as an information

system (Stamper, 1992). OS will shed light on the

use of information as a sign and its relation to

objects through interpretations made by actors.

Based on OS, organisations are information systems

in which information is created, processed, stored,

used and presented (Liu et al., 2002). From a

semiotic perspective, an organisation is a multi-

layered system in which IM activities take place in

all three spheres in the “organisational onion”

(Figure 2).

Figure 2: IM activities in three spheres in the

“organisational onion”.

Informal Layer. Whole organisation, including

relationships not officially defined and activities not

formally specified; e.g. t raining and awareness is

crucial for effective information management.

Leadership team must also practice and support

good IM. This leads to a culture of managing

information over time in the organisation and

provides suitable environment for this purpose.

Formal Layer. Relationships defined in the

organisational structure, responsibility and activities

explicitly specified by the organisation or enforced

by law. IM practice in each organisation must

comply with the standards and policies imposed by

the regulatory bodies or governing organisations. In

addition, “best practice” emerged through past

experiences offers a useful reference model for IM

processes and the functions of the technical system.

Technical Layer. Activities and functions

performed by the IT system for information

management. Those patterns of practice and

knowledge of IM must be captured and incorporated

into the design of IM processes and relevant IT

system.

Knowledge and practice of IM can be captured

and analysed with the Norm Analysis Method

(NAM) (Liu, 2000). NAM treats patterns of

behavior and business knowledge as norms which

govern people’s actions. Identifying the norms will

enable us to understand and model the IM practice in

the organisation.

The general form for specifying a norm is as

follows (Liu, 2000):

Whenever <context>

if <state>

then <agent>

is <deontic operator> to <action>.

The <context> refers to the situation while the

<state> shows the conditions. The <agent> is the

actor which this norm is applied to. The <deontic

operator> can be obliged, permitted or prohibited.

The <action> is the behaviour that the specified

agent should carry out. For example, consider this

rule: all online shopping can be returned within 14

days. This can be specified in a norm as follows:

whenever a person shopped online,

if within 14 days of shopping,

then the purchaser is

permitted to return the item.

Analysing norms in this way brings more

flexibility into the system since norms capture

patterns of behaviour and are attached to system

functions; therefore, changes in one of these (norms

or system functions) will not affect the other. Few

methods provide guideline on analysing norms and

most methods assume to hard code them at the end;

therefore, any changes in business rules may end up

with changing the coding and in some cases even

rewriting the software. NAM helps to prevent this

kind of disastrous situations. More information on

NAM can be found in (Salter and Liu, 2002). An OS

motivated method for IM helps organisations solve

mentioned issues and achieve competitive

advantages through proper information management.

4 A METHOD FOR THE

CO-DESIGN OF BUSINESS

AND IT SYSTEMS

Alignment of business and IT systems has been seen

an important challenge to be faced by the industry

and researchers (

Thevenet and Salinesi, 2007).

Integration between business processes and IT

functions in IM has been an ambition to many. As

Ladley (2010) stated: “separation of IM from

business processes must become [a] historical

artefact”.

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Co-design is the process that addresses this

problem and tries to solve the issue by encouraging

analysts to concentrate on the organisational and

technical design issues concurrently. Co-design

should be a continuous process to make sure that IT

systems and business processes are effectively co-

aligned.

The model for co-design (Figure 3) is an

extension of the work of Liu et al. (Liu et al., 2002)

with reference to other recent research in other

relevant fields, particularly soft systems

methodology (SSM) (Checkland and Scholes, 1990)

and organisational semiotics (e.g. organisational

onion) (Liu, 2000). In this model, an organisation is

presented in three layered information system,

informal-formal-technical, and tasks to be performed

in each layer are explained subsequently.

Figure 3: Dynamic co-design of business-IT systems.

Phase 1. Problem identification: The aim of this

phase is to identify an existing problem and

formulate it in a structured way to be investigated

and solved. The rationale behind this phase is that,

for the same problem, individuals see different

symptoms, but they do not understand the root cause

of these symptoms. Therefore, knowledge from

different domains of an organisation should be

gathered to find the main problem.

Phase 2. Current Formal System Analysis: This

phase involves identifying involved business

processes and activities related to the problem.

Phase 3. Target Formal System Analysis: This

phase represents the target situation in the

organisation. Desired changes should be applied to

the business processes determined at the second

phase.

Phase 4. Current IT System Analysis: The current

technical system should be analysed as well. This

phase includes two main activities:

1. Identifying applications and related IT

systems (entities)

2. Identifying the structure of the database

currently working in the organisation.

Phase 5. Comparison of Target Formal and IT

systems: The target model of the organisation shows

the desired situation which IT should support.

Therefore, a comparison should be made between

the target model and IT systems to find that which

parts of IT systems need to be changed to support

changes in business effectively and efficiently. For

this purpose, followings should be identified:

1. The processes which are automated into

machine will be identified and shown to

what extent they are automated into IT

systems.

2. Norms and business entities that should be

supported by IT.

Phase 6. Conflict Resolution: The aim is to

validate changes and whether they can be

implemented or not. Until this phase, all the required

changes in formal layer (phase 4) and technical layer

(phase 5) are identified; however, there are some

issues, such as, conflicts, interactions and overlap

between informal, formal and technical layers and

should be studied carefully.

Phase 7. Implementation: The outcome of phase 6

will determine which identified changes are

affordable for the organisation. Therefore, an action

will be taken to apply changes as simultaneously as

possible in both formal and technical layers.

The dynamic model for co-design proposed here

shows an organisation in three layers surrounded by

dash lines, because modern organisation do not have

defined borders which separate them from their

environment. This argument has been justified in

Daft (2007) although the same author specified solid

border as one of the main elements of an

organisation in Daft (1998) (Daft, 1998; Daft, 2007).

In addition, the border between different layers is

not defined either. That is why dashed lines are put

to separate layers from each other.

The loop between phases 1 - 3 is to address the

complexity of the problem and due to the

consideration that there may not be a single and

straight answer to the problem. The negotiation

between stakeholders and the changes made will

hopefully result in a more promising solution to the

problem in hand.

The main outcome of the co-design model is an

adaptable information system which is responsive to

business needs. By applying this model, business

processes and IT systems are designed as one

integral unit and can interact effectively to support

business needs and decisions. Such a system will

bring competitive advantages. In summary, the

model for co-design aims to overcome the limitation

CO-DESIGN OF AN ADAPTABLE SYSTEM FOR INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

327

of current methods. The proposed model will be

evaluated through using a case study and its benefits

and validity will also be justified through its

application.

5 THE CO-DESIGN METHOD IN

ACTION

In the previous section, the proposed method and its

theoretical benefits has been discussed. Here, we

demonstrate its practice and application in a real

world situation. The case study is based on the

practice in a large British shipping company. This

company is well established and has a defined

structure for every department. However, they have

many problems for managing information,

documents and contents as they consider IM as part

of each department rather than a universal section on

its own.

The company introduced the notion of controlled

document, referring to those which should be

created, stored, updated and published to related

audiences. Each control document has a set of

controls, such as document owner, approver (who

approves the content) and revision history shown in

front or back of the document in addition to page

number, ID, status (draft or obsolete) and

date/number displayed in all pages. All the

documents should be recorded in the controlled

document register by relevant document controller

role. Every registry includes the owner, approver

and next review date. All these policies in place, yet

the company is still struggling with the overload of

information and maintaining controlled document

lifecycle.

Phase 1. Having the proposed model in mind, the

problem identification step seeks to find the root of

the problem described by different people who see

different symptoms and look for different solutions.

As a result of communication and brainstorming

sessions inside the organisation, the analyst will

realise the root problem which causes different

symptoms. This phase might have a standard pattern

of sessions, but the whole process is highly informal.

Moreover, there is no straight answer to the

problems identified and experience of analysts and

stakeholders involved in this stage has an effect on

the quality of the solution.

Phase 2. By articulating the problem, all the

processes and activities related to the controlled

document practice will be analysed to understand

which of them lead to the problem and should be

removed, changed or improved. In addition, business

rules related to each activity will be studied in this

phase to specify the expected behaviour of agents,

either human or computer, performing the action.

Figure 4 shows the concise version of the document

management processes using use case diagram in

which every use-case contains a set of activities, two

of which, ‘distribute document’ and ‘dispose

document’, are investigated closely.

Figure 4: Document management use case diagram

Distribute Document Process.

The current activities of distribute process are

shown in figure 5. Several issues can be addressed in

this activity diagram. For example, the activity to

“put the main copy in the safe place” is not defined

based on the fact that a “safe place” can differ for

each person; personal computer, company email,

personal email and etc.. Moreover, when

interviewing related people in the organisation,

nobody could define who is authorised to identify

the audience of a document and who controls the

distribution. In other words, it is not clear who is

responsible for the distribution of information to the

unauthorised audiences.

Figure 5: ‘Distribute document’ activity diagram Dispose

Document Process.

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The disposal process is presented in figure 6 and

entails some issues; there is almost no action for

informing audience about the disposal of a document

and no clear job description for “Document Admin”.

It is always mentioned that document admin liaise

with others to handle the disposal of document but

who disposes it and what exactly is document

admin's job. In addition, responsibilities of a

document controller can be carried out by a

computer agent without any need for communication

or liaise between document admin and document

controller.

To specify the business rules, NAM is used as

explained in previous section. Considering “dispose

document” activity diagram (figure 6) an example of

written business norm in which document approver

should control disposal of a document is:

Whenever a controlled document exists,

if it is no longer applicable or needed,

then the document owner

is obliged to consult the admin about its

withdrawal.

This way of writing norms is readable and

understandable for both business and technical

people and can be easily transferred to the

programmer for coding if a new IT system is needed

to be written.

Any of these problems and many more that has not

been mentioned affect the day to day job of the

organisational and make it less efficient and

productive. Therefore, they should be studied well

and improved.

Phase 3. As a result of the analysis of all

processes and activities, some improvements are

proposed and a new process model is proposed. The

roles of the document admin and document

Figure 6: ‘Dispose document’ activity diagram.

controller were blurred and can be delegated to other

roles or automated. The new proposed process

model is presented in figure 7. Document admin and

controller are removed and the job of registering

documents is delegated to the document owner. In

fact, document registering activity will be automated

and an IT system will handle it on behalf of

document owner. Problems in activity diagram can

also be addressed and the related changes be

reflected both in activity diagrams and norms.

Phase 4. After detailed analysis of processes and

activities, target ones are proposed. Now this is the

time to see whether the current IT system can

support these changes or not. Two main questions

should be answered in this phase: (i) what

information for carrying out and controlling

activities is being captured and processed by IT

system and (ii) which IT applications support which

processes identified in phase 2 and to what extend.

Figure 7: Improved document management processes.

In our case, the company has already had an IT

system to support the IM process even though the IT

system itself made everything more complicated. It

might have been helpful someday, but as a result of

several changes in business processes and not

reflecting them in the IT system. It has become the

bottleneck to the business.

Phase 5. As a result of analysis of the target

process and activities and comparing with current IT

system, a target IT system is put forward. Semantic

analysis method (SAM), one of organisational

semiotics methods, is used here for data modelling

(Liu, 2000). Ontology charts are the output of SAM.

An ontology chart is drawn from left to right while

the existence of right nodes (dependents) is

dependent on left nodes (antecedents). For example,

for an employment to exist there must be a person

and a company. Role names are written on the line

to clarify each side in relationships (figure 8).

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329

Figure 8: Sample ontology chart.

A simplified version of the data model, one of

ontology charts, is presented here as a case in point

(figure 9). The shipping company is accompanied by

a # sign to show it is one of the companies that we

keep track of their information. So, if in the future

the company is extended or split into two

companies, there is no need to redo the IT system.

Moreover, the list of all document audiences is

worked out by the shipping company related

authority and document owner should not be

concerned with it. He will publish it to the related

people as shown in the fig. 9. The result of SAM can

acts as a database schema which captures necessary

and quality data as mentioned in (Jiang et al., 2009)

“the schema of a database plays a significant role in

ensuring quality of data in the database”. Such a

database is stable and acts as base for the IT system.

In figure 9, terms written on the lines are role

names. Role names (or labels) exist because of an

association between two entities. For example,

document audience is an employee (a person who

has an employment contract with a company) to

whom a document is related. Moreover, a document

is only published to related audiences and, in the

case of disposal of the document, only related

audiences will be informed.

Figure 9: A current data model supporting the IT system.

The proposed IT system can be bespoke or an off-

the-shelf package. For the shipping company, a

package application was proposed and configured

carefully to the need of the business; the ontology

chart has been applied easily and the problems of

which some discussed here have been addressed.

Phase 6. Related stakeholders were involved in a

series of discussions and meetings to come to an

agreement and, as mentioned in the model, the

conflict resolution stage led to an agreement on the

solution followed by the full implementation in

phase 7. It should be emphasised that the analyst

played a key role in the conflict resolution stage.

The result of the applicability of the proposed

method and solutions are discussed in the next

section.

6 VALIDITY OF THE METHOD

FOR IS DESIGN

The organisational semiotics realm regards

organisations as information systems. Long before

the existence of technology, there were organisation,

human interactions and needed information was

captured with other means (Beynon-Davis, 2009).

We tend to follow the same principle and consider

organisations as information systems with three

layers; the classification of “informal-formal-

technical” provides analysts with a better view of

who should be contacted and what should be

studied. Those tasks put in the informal layer are

concerned with human interaction, organisational

culture, employees view towards changes and etc.

Consequently, tasks in the formal layer include

studying the organisation including human

interactions, but repetitiveness and predictability are

main features of actions in this layer. Finally, in the

technical layer, the main concern is the automation

of the business processes and the interaction with

machine. This distinction organises the analysts’

mentality and helps through the process of co-

design.

A well defined design method must have three

main elements (Buede, 2009); (i) a good view of

organisation’s processes along with activities

performed in each process, (ii) business rules which

control these activities, and (iii) an information

system to capture and feed the necessary information

for carrying out activities. The proposed co-design

method includes these elements and the applicability

has been discussed in detail in section 5. In other

words, use case and activity diagrams are familiar

methods in business practice and help to obtain a

clear view of current states of an organisation and

facilitate communication among different people to

reach an agreement for the desired state. This shows

that the proposed co-design method has the first

main element of a well defined design practice. The

ontology chart resulted from SAM is a conceptual

model of information needed to be captured. This

model can later on be transformed into database to

form an integral information system.

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Since business rules are identified in a way that it

is readable by human and machine and it is specified

that which rules are related to which activity and

which agent is carrying out that activity, any

changes in these rules can be reflected immediately.

In addition, Database designed based on ontology

chart is immune from redesign, and extendable to

adapt to future changes in activities.

In conclusion the advantages of proposed tools

and techniques are to make the co-design process

flexible enough to be adaptable to changes. In other

words, it will be able to adapt and adjust to future

needs. Therefore, the co-design model is well-

defined, adaptable and extendable, and helps

organisation to manage problems and changes

effectively as it did for the shipping company.

7 CONCLUSIONS

That “information is an asset” is a common

statement. Therefore it should be better managed.

Although this makes sense, it does not get the

information management activities funded. Although

the first step to have a good information

management is to standardise its activities, a good IT

system should be employed due to the overload of

information. In this paper, we proposed a co-design

method which helps to design a better information

management practice by involving people from

different disciplines aligned with IT systems. A

shipping company is examined as a case study and

findings are discussed. Adopted tools and techniques

in the co-design model are industry standardised; it

makes the co-design model easily applicable and

users can spend time on main and new principles

instead of learning new techniques. This also

facilitates communications of concerns and

objectives. As a result of several follow up

interviews with related stakeholders, the benefits of

employed system identified and brought here.

Future work includes extending the norm analysis

to provide a formal procedure for capturing

communications and norms. In addition, the problem

identification and conflict resolution stages, which

are quite informal and does not have strict structure,

needs further research regarding cultural, social, and

individual behaviour towards change; due to the fact

that the proposed changes might cause resistance

against change or alter the change process since

individuals have their own agendas.

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