Title: WORKFLOW AND ORGANIZATIONAL UNIT: AN EMPIRICAL COMPARISON OF ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVES
Abstract: Many processes, techniques, tools, methodologies, and approaches claim to facilitate theprocess of information systems development, but little empirical validation in support ofthese claims has been publicly reported. This research addresses this shortcoming in twoways. First, it develops and applies a promising experimental design for the comparison ofsystems analysis techniques. The design's objective was to external validity of experimentalfindings while maintaining high degrees of control and comparability. Secondly, our design,the experiment, was used to evaluate two versions of an analysis procedure.This paper both presents and evaluates the transcript experiment as a research design andreports the results of an actual experiment.The study we report investigated the impact of a particular factor in the systemsanalysis process, which we term analysis perspective. After elaborating a (partial) theory ofsystems analysis enabling us to predict the impact of different analysis perspectives on (1)the analysis process, (2) the content of reports it produces, and (3) the utility of theanalystsâ recommendations, we compared the influences of two particular perspectives, theworkflow perspective and the organizational unit perspective. We observed significantdifferences in subject behavior in acquiring information during the analysis process, but thedata were inconclusive with respect to our predictions concerning the content of reports andthe utility of subjectsâ recommendations. Finally, we noted a strong negative correlationbetween the number of recommendations produced by a subject and the degree to which hedocumented the current system. We term this correlation the descriptive/prescriptive tradeoff,and feel it deserves further study, as it may invalidate a number of widely-held assumptionsconcerning the systems design process.
Publication Year: 1986
Publication Date: 1986-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
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