Information systems as social structures

  • Authors:

  • Ariel Fuxman;Paolo Giorgini;Manuel Kolp;John Mylopoulos

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada;University of Trento, Trento, Italy;University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada;University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the international conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems - Volume 2001
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Organizations are changing at an ever-faster pace, as they try tokeep up with globalization and the information revolution.Unfortunately, information systems technologies do not supportsystem evolution well, making information systems a roadblock toorganizational change. We propose to view information systems associal structures and define methodologies which develop and evolveseamlessly an information system within its operationalenvironment. To this end, this paper proposes an ontology forinformation systems that is inspired by social and organizationalstructures. The ontology adopts components of the i*organizational modeling framework, which is founded on the notionsof actor, goal and social dependency. Socialpatterns, drawn from research on cooperative and distributedarchitectures, offer a more macroscopic level of social structuredescription. Finally, the proposed ontology includes organizationalstyles inspired from organization theory. These are used not onlyto model the overall organizational context of an informationsystem, but also its architecture. Social patterns andorganizational styles are defined in terms of configurations ofi* concepts. The research has been conducted in the contextof the Troposproject.