Carson C. Woo

A three-faceted view of information systems

Dealing with change is one of the most fundamental challenges facing information systems professionals today. Business process restructuring, shifting alliances and new competitors, deregulation and globalization, legacy system migration and new technology adoption, are but a few of the economical, organizational, and technological forces contributing to the pervasiveness of change in today’s IT environment. Flexible and adaptable information systems can be powerful enablers for organizational and business innovations, whereas rigid, inflexible systems are serious obstacles to organizational effectiveness and success.

KNOWLEDGE COMMUNICATION IN INTELLIGENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

An intelligent information system may be composed of hundreds or thousands of entities each of which may possess some part of the overall knowledge of an organization. In such an environment there is a need for these entities to communicate in order to share knowledge and to cooperate in accomplishing organizational activities. In this paper we propose an architecture for modelling intelligent information systems and discuss how this architecture supports the communication of knowledge in such information systems.

Officeaid: An integrated document management system

Document management is a major activity in an office. Documents are created, edited, distributed, and stored. While facilities for managing electronic documents exist, they are often poorly integrated. In this paper, the design and implementation of an integrated document management system - Officeaid - is described. In the design, four major objectives were considered: develop effective and useful man-machine interfaces, provide integrated facilities, utilize data base management techniques, and provide support for different types of data.

The Role of Conceptual Modeling in Managing and Changing the Business

Conceptual modeling has been used mainly for supporting information systems (IS) development. In order to better capture requirements for developing IS, we have been extending conceptual models to include more business context (e.g., mission of the organization). This seems to interest organizational workers in using those conceptual models to solve problems. We propose dual roles for conceptual modeling: developing IS, and managing the changes occurring in the business. To fulfill the second role, conceptual modeling must provide constructs that are not biased toward IS background and thinking, but assist organizational workers to better understand the business and its operations. Research and literature on management will be useful to accomplish this objective. Our research in this direction suggests much potential in expanding conceptual modeling to support organizational workers.

Document Management Systems

Document management is a major activity in an office, and one that is readily amenable to computerization. A great deal of research and development has been done on facilities for editing, formatting, filing, retrieving and mailing documents in office systems. However, there has been a lack of attention to the integration of such facilities. In this paper, we discuss our view of what a document management system should be, and what facilities it should provide. An integrated document management system, Officeaid, is used as an example, throughout the paper, to illustrate our approach.

Is It Possible and Useful to Support Commitment Reasoning

The concept of commitment has recently been adopted by researchers to model cooperative organizational activities. By defining a commitment as an agreement by an agent to the requesting agent to carry out the requested action, a Commitment Reasoning Support System (CRSS) is proposed in an attempt to support the reasoning process in deciding whether or not to make a commitment. CRSS can be characterized as a specialized decision support system that emphasizes the accountability and the sentimental aspects of decision making. An empirical study was conducted on a CRSS prototype. The findings show that it is useful for commitment requests with high complexity and/or with important implications. The study also suggests possible conceptual insights of commitment reasoning for future research.