A cross‐disciplinary model for improved information systems analysis

Abstract

As organizations seek to prosper in ever more complex and changing environments, they will require ever more sophisticated analysis and design tools. Current systems analysis tools function well to identify hardware and software requirements – the mostly technical elements of systems – but are less well suited to address the human component, an understanding of which is crucial to successful organizational analysis and design. The best technically designed system can easily fail when human factors are not explicitly included. The authors show how a combination of systems analysis and communication auditing methods can jointly optimize both the social and technical elements of organizations as they undergo design or business process re‐engineering. As a result of this joint optimization, the authors maintain that systems analysis tools are enriched and thereby enable system designers to explicitly include human and organizational communication factors into an information or business system. A theoretical model and implementation examples are provided.