Lane (2009) argued that everything we do involves interactions with artefacts that help us to communicate and generate new artefacts. Almost all of our interactions depend on organisations for their settings, purposes and rules, whether they are universities, businesses, government agencies, political parties, law courts, police forces, armies or social networks in real life or even on the internet. Lane also argued that humans did not invent either artefacts or organisations, but rather these arose from and were a feature of biological evolution. Likewise, interpretivist information systems research assumes that the social world (relations, organisations, division of labour) is not ‘given’. Rather, the social world is produced and reinforced by humans through their action and interaction. Organisations, groups and social networks do not exist apart from humans' motivation to communicate and interact, and hence these difficult to be captured, characterised and measured in some objective or general manner.
Since the new design and development methods are concerned with creating and using the artefacts, these artefacts should take into consideration the context of the system. Gero and Kannengiesser (2003a; 2003b; 2003c) argued that structure, behaviour and function parameters can represent different aspects of artefacts design, where multiple agents’ perspectives can offer an accurate view of the design situation. To handle the design issues, the authors built a framework linking these three aspects, in which they assumed that knowledge is grounded in experience and interaction with the environment. This is what gives the environment and agent the dynamic characteristics necessary to continuously
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improve the design based on the knowledge acquired. Moreover, Lane (2009) argued that the artefacts emerged in circumstances with properties described as the following:• Artefacts: drive and help to build new components/services • Artefact settings: the configuration or characteristics
• Purpose: the goal and the underlying intention for creating artefacts • Rules: needed to govern behaviour to use and produce artefacts • Roles: roles of the artefacts and their users/agents
• Interaction: among the agents, services or artefacts in their networks
These are applicable to socio-technical systems, where artefact design is knowledge creation, and the settings are related to the technicality and mechanism of creating and using these artefacts. The purpose is the motivation to create and use the artefacts, rules to govern the behaviour and roles to assign responsibilities, and finally the interaction among all of these in their context. However, Jarke et al. (2011) and Mumford (2006) argued that there is no complete design and the requirements keep intertwining within the context, also the design evolves gradually with ecology. Gero and Kannengiesser (2003b; 2003c) present the additional argument that not all of the requirements are known at the outset of a task, so conceptual design involves finding what is needed and modifying it again during the process. This makes the environment within which the processes operate dynamic and uncertain. Since knowledge is grounded in the environment and the agent interacts with the environment by performing tasks, the agent’s worldview changes depending on what they do. The potential realisation of these theories relies on the idea that in order to analyse business complexity and dynamic change, consideration needs to be given to the need to decompose business models into smaller components and the need for those components to be at the abstract level. In the most suitable cases, this will be simulated or implemented in ISs or at least have a direct mapping to IT/IS components on the execution level. Since socio-technical systems have emigrant properties for each whole system and depend on the system components as well as the relationship and dependencies between them, this makes the socio- technical properties consistently dynamic and subject to change.
Based on the previous assumptions, the research will map out a facilitated approach covering the perspectives of the parameters mentioned in Gero (2003) and Lane (2009), which can be explained thus: every complex business model can be decomposed into: 1) rules, 2) processes, 3) events, 4) structures, and 5) functions. These five components will give answers
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regarding: 1) the "where" and "when" as temporal and physical constraints; 2) the "how"; 3) the "what" event cause and "when"; 4) what "thing" and "relations"; and 5) "what" to do. Considering that every autonomous entity has a certain goal and that that goal needs a process to be fulfilled under specific rules, this process needs specific functionality; this could be related to temporal and physical events and could come from outside or inside the system. The enterprise model based approach (Loucopoulos and Kavakli, 1995) integrated with dynamics and reasoning modelling, is a good candidate that can offer a way to build the syntax and semantics of the notions grounded from the literature (Gero, 2003; Lane, 2009; Jarke et al., 2011; Mumford, 2006). Also this helps to satisfy the required analysis and design knowledge towards building a solution for holistic socio-technical analysis and design.To address the lack of socio-technical system visibility, enterprises must be able to visualise their socio-technical systems through formal architecture models. The suggested framework combines enterprise modelling that aims to provide a structured approach for modelling and offering holistic semantic knowledge in order to offer managers and socio-technical engineers the necessary insight to help them to make better decisions to design socio-technical systems; using dynamic simulation and qualitative reasoning will enhance decision-making capabilities. The insight given should be continuously assessed during the analysis and design process or in an ideal situation to be automatically adaptive to handle change during the operation ‘in the run-time’. The suggested modelling framework will allow smooth transfer from business to IS or build what are called enterprise model driven ISs by linking the social and business artefacts to the necessary IT artefacts. The framework will help analysts to do the following:
• Manage change in the enterprise (visibility and agility) • Understand systemic implications/risks
• Optimise enterprises for expected outcomes
• Create alignment between strategy, operation and IS implementation • Provide a foundation for continuous improvement