Co-Design of Business and IT Systems—Introduction by Guest Editors

Abstract

Informationtechnology(orIT)hasanimportantroletoplay in business organisations. The assumption that theuse of IT is necessary in any business is almost takenfor granted. It can be witnessed that continual invest-ments in IT have to be made to sustain the productivityin industry. However, it has been widely observed thatthere is often a gap between an operational IT systemand current business requirements in an organisation.An IT system, that at one time is highly supportive, af-teraninitialperiodoftime,couldimposeconstraintstobusiness operations, and could be regarded as a legacysystem. Such a problem may be caused by a number offactors. One is that IT systems and business processesarenottreatedasoneintegralunitandtheyaredesignedseparately. Calibration and adjustment of IT and busi-ness systems can overcome some of the problem, butsometimes more costly exercises such as process re-engineering or re-development of the IT system haveto be involved. Many research communities such ascomputing and management sciences have made greateffort in searching for a solution, through investigationof flexible architecture of IT systems, evolutionary in-formation systems and co-evolution of IT systems andbusiness processes.The co-design of business and IT systems is an ap-proach towards this direction. When an IT system isviewed as a part of the business organisation, and boththe IT and business systems are designed in the sametime, the gap between them can be minimised. Thisis a position taken by most of the authors in this spe-cial issue. In this paper, we shall first of all discuss themotivation of why the co-design is important, giventhe context of constant changes of IT functionality andbusinessrequirements.Weshallthenpresentaperspec-tivefortheco-designbyintroducingthetheoryofsemi-otics and presenting our arguments derived from thoseviewpoints. Highlights of the papers in this special is-suewillthenbepresented,followedbyconclusionsandfuture work.