Steven Alter

Service system fundamentals: work system, value chain, and life cycle

Service systems produce all services of significance and scope, yet the concept of a service system is not well articulated in the service literature. This paper presents three interrelated frameworks as a first attempt to define the fundamentals of service systems. These frameworks identify basic building blocks and organize important attributes and change processes that apply across all service systems. Although relevant regardless of whether a service system uses information technology, the frameworks are also potentially useful in visualizing the realities of moving toward automated service architectures. This paper uses two examples, one largely manual and one highly automated, to illustrate the potential usefulness of the three frameworks, which can be applied together to describe, analyze, and study how service systems are created, how they operate, and how they evolve through a combination of planned and unplanned change.

Defining Information Systems as Work Systems: Implications for the IS Field

The lack of an agreed upon definition of information system (IS) is one of many obstacles troubling the academic IS discipline. After listing a number of definitions of IS, this paper defines IS as a special case of work system as defined in Alter (1999a). This definition has many desirable characteristics: it is easy to understand; differentiates IS from information technology (IT); covers totally manual, partially automated, and totally automated ISs; links to a life cycle model that generates many insights about development and implementation problems; provides a simple guideline that helps in interpreting common IS/IT jargon; and has other useful implications related to IS concepts, IS terminology, and the analysis and design of ISs. The paper presents the proposed IS definition and evaluates the definition in terms of simplicity, clarity, scope, systematic power, explanatory power, validity, reliability, and fruitfulness. An Appendix summarizes previously published concepts and two frameworks that flow from the proposed definition and are useful for appreciating many points in the evaluation section.

A general, yet useful theory of information systems

This paper proposes a general, yet useful theory of information systems. It is a response to repeated lamentations and debates about whether it is possible to find a set of core concepts for the IS field. Business and IT professionals can apply this theory for understanding and analyzing information systems. Academic researchers can apply it for gaining a deeper appreciation of past research and for developing future research projects. This theory tries to be equally applicable to all information systems, and not just to a particular type of application such as TPS, MIS, DSS, EIS, GSS, or ERP. It also tries to be equally applicable to information systems of today, of 20 years ago, and of the near term

Architecture of Sysperanto: A Model-Based Ontology of the IS Field

The challenge of defining the domain and core concepts of the IS field is a perennial topic at major IS conferences. This paper describes the architecture of Sysperanto, a model-based ontology of the IS field. Sysperanto is being developed as part of an ongoing effort to create methods that typical business professionals can use to analyze systems and system-related projects for themselves at whatever level of depth is appropriate. The name Sysperanto is meant as a metaphor combining generality (covering the IS field), vocabulary (identification of terms), and structure (internally consistent organization) to create an ontology more powerful and useful than a list of keywords or propositions. Sysperanto’s architecture provides an organizing framework for codifying the disparate and inconsistent propositions, methods, and findings that constitute the current state of IS knowledge and, in combination, form a major obstacle to knowledge accumulation and use in the IS field. Instead of yet another discussion of whether the IS field lacks a conceptual core and what might be the consequences of such a shortcoming, this paper proposes an architecture and preliminary details of a plausible set of core concepts for the IS field. It starts by summarizing Sysperanto’s goals and explaining why work system concepts, rather than information system concepts, are the core of Sysperanto. It presents Sysperanto as a terminological ontology and explains the underlying meta-model. The meta-model is designed to support tools for analyzing systems from a business viewpoint and to help in codifying and organizing knowledge in the IS field. It uses a conceptual map based on extensiveness and guidance in application to compare Sysperanto with other efforts to organize ideas in the IS field. It may be several years before a complete version of Sysperanto is tested through its use in a formal method for analyzing systems or through comparison with other attempts to codify knowledge in the IS field. Nonetheless, its architecture is well enough defined to be compared to the architecture (or lack of architecture) in previous and future approaches for understanding and organizing the basic concepts about information systems.

Theory of Workarounds

Although mentioned frequently in the organization, management, public administration, and technology literatures, workarounds are understudied and undertheorized. This article provides an integrated theory of workarounds that describes how and why workarounds are created. The theory covers most types of workarounds and most situations in which workarounds occur in operational systems. This theory is based on a broad but useful definition of workaround that clarifies the preconditions for the occurrence of a workaround. The literature review is organized around a diagram that combines the five “voices” in the literature of workarounds. That diagram is modeled after the diagram summarizing Orton and Weick’s [1990] loose coupling theory, which identified and combined five similar voices in the literature about loose coupling. Building on that basis, the theory of workarounds is a process theory driven by the interaction of key factors that determine whether possible workarounds are considered and how they are executed. This theory is useful for classifying workarounds and analyzing how they occur, for understanding compliance and noncompliance to methods and management mandates, for incorporating consideration of possible workarounds into systems analysis and design, and for studying how workarounds and other adaptations sometimes lead to larger planned changes in systems.

Information Systems Risks and Risk Factors: Are They Mostly About Information Systems?

This article is the second of two whose goal is to advance the discussion of IS risk by addressing limitations of the current IS risk literature. The first article [Alter and Sherer, 2004] presented a general, but broadly adaptable model of system-related risk that addressed the limited usefulness of existing IS risk models for business managers. In this article, we focus on organizing risk factors to make them more useful and meaningful for business managers. This article shows how the nine elements of the work system framework can be used to organize the hundreds of risk factors in the IS risk literature. It also shows that many of the most important and most commonly cited risk factors for IS in operation and IS projects are actually risk factors for work systems in general. Furthermore, risk factors initially associated with one type of system (e.g. ERP implementation) are often equally relevant at other levels (e.g., information systems projects or work systems in general). Over half of the risk factors in a representative sample of the IS risk literature are valid for work systems in general. This conclusion is a step toward useful risk diagnostic tools based on an organized set of risk factors that are meaningful to business managers and IT professionals.

The IS Core - XI: Sorting Out the Issues About the Core, Scope, and Identity of the IS Field

Debates about the core and the scope of the IS field and about whether the core and scope are related to a crisis in the field have smoldered for many years. This article is a response to ten articles submitted by members of the CAIS Editorial Board who accepted an invitation to contribute to a debate about the core and scope of the IS field. Those articles were written as responses to Benbasat and Zmud’s [2003] article “The Identity Crisis Within the IS Discipline: Defining and Communicating the Discipline’s Core Properties” and my rebuttal [Alter 2003b] entitled “Sidestepping the IT Artifact, Scrapping the IS Silo, and Laying Claim to “Systems in Organizations.” The present article is organized around excerpts related to the major topics the ten articles address as a group: What are the core and scope of the IS field? Is “the IT artifact” a meaningful concept? Whatever the core might be today, could tomorrow bring something different? Who is the customer of IS research? Do we believe the IS discipline is having an identity crisis? How do institutional issues shape the IS field? What if we followed Benbasat and Zmud’s suggestions? The conclusion attempts to sort out various views of the core, scope, and (possible) crisis of the IS field by identifying major products and major customers of the academic IS field and asking which customers are interested in which products. If a crisis exists, it is about the perceptions of certain customers, but not others, and may be only tangentially related to issues about the core or scope of the IS field. On the other hand, the core and scope of the IS field do have implications for the value of the products it produces and for its long-term ability to serve all of its major customers.

Work Systems and IT Artifacts - Does the Definition Matter?

Lurking just under the surface of longstanding debates about rigor versus relevance and about the core and scope of the IS field is the question of whether inadequate definitions of basic terms is an obstacle to progress. This article focuses on whether the definition of IT artifact or work system really matters. It identifies five definitions of IT artifact and IT-enabled work system, and then looks in detail at whether the definition of work system mattered in Jasperson, Carter, and Zmud’s [2005] article in MIS Quarterly about post-adoptive behaviors. It argues that their definition perhaps affected their conceptualization of post-adoptive behaviors. It presents an alternative model illustrating how a different definition and greater attention to work system issues might have led to a different conceptualization that addresses different issues.

Are the Fundamental Concepts of Information Systems Mostly About Work Systems

Audience comments about a debate at ICIS200 [Alter et al., 2001] related to ebusiness and the fundamental concepts of information systems noted that the debate was undercut by the lack of agreement about what are the fundamental concepts. As a follow-on to that debate, this article proposes a set of fundamental concepts for information systems. While there is no bullet-proof way to prove that a particular set of concepts captures what is truly fundamental within a diverse and rapidly evolving field, the attempt to identify these concepts challenges the reader to ask “If this isn’t the way to identify fundamental concepts, what is the way to do that? If these aren’t the fundamental concepts, what is a better set of fundamental concepts and why?” This article’s overarching theme is that the fundamental concepts of information systems are mostly fundamental concepts of work systems in general. The article defines “fundamental concept” and discusses various considerations for identifying them. It then proposes a set of fundamental concepts organized in several layers. The first layer concentrates on the elements needed to summarize a work system. The second layer adds concepts that constitute a general vocabulary for describing, understanding, and evaluating work systems. Each concept in the second layer is related to a specific concept in the first layer.

Why Persist with DSS when the Real Issue is Improving Decision Making

Abstract This paper presents many direct and indirect arguments concerning the limited usefulness today of the once innovative concept of DSS as a fundamental idea for either research or practice. “Improving decision making” is a more fundamental idea, and an idea that practicing managers and users really care about.