Global perspectives on legacy systems

Summarises findings of two international workshops on legacy systems, held in conjunction with an EPSRC managed programme. Issues covered include the nature and dynamics of legacy systems, the co-evolution of software and organisations, issues around software as a technology (its engineering and its management), and organisational/people issues

Information systems: a cyborg discipline?

This paper argues for a model of information systems in terms of cyborgs – a boundary-crossing mixture of the technical and the social. The argument for this model is substantiated from the personal experience of the author, presented as examples of being a cyborg researcher within a disciplinary context. Lessons for information systems are drawn

Forms and processes of information systems evolution

The way in which software evolves over time has been much studied and is now fairly well-understood. What has been less thoroughly studied are the processes by which information systems – containing software as one component, but also with significant human and organisational aspects – evolve. In many organisations, few information systems are built at all from scratch, but rather are modified from or built on top of existing ones or bolted together from third-party components. In practice, the old division between design, implementation and maintenance has largely disappeared. In this paper, I discuss the nature of IS evolution. I make a distinction between planned (intentional and strategic) evolution, for which we can formulate a clear process; and unplanned (emergent and externally-driven) evolution, where we can simply study the dynamics of the process and be ready for events

Introduction: The difference that makes a difference

This article introduces TripleC’s Special Issue on The Difference That Makes a Difference, containing papers arising from a workshop of the same name that ran in Milton Keynes in September 2011. The background to the workshop is explained, workshop sessions are summarised, and the content of the papers introduced. Finally, some provisional outcomes from the workshop and the Special Issue are described

Systems Thinkers

Systems Thinkers presents a biographical history of the field of systems thinking, by examining the life and work of thirty of its major thinkers. It discusses each thinker's key contributions, the way this contribution was expressed in practice and the relationship between their life and ideas. This discussion is supported by an extract from the thinker's own writing, to give a flavour of their work and to give readers a sense of which thinkers are most relevant to their own interests. \ud Systems thinking is necessarily interdisciplinary, so that the thinkers selected come from a wide range of areas - biology, management, physiology, anthropology, chemistry, public policy, sociology and environmental studies among others. Some are core innovators in systems ideas; some have been primarily practitioners who also advanced and popularised systems ideas; others are well-known figures who drew heavily upon systems thinking although it was not their primary discipline. A significant aim of the book is to broaden and deepen the reader's interest in systems writers, providing an appetising "taster" for each of the 30 thinkers, so that the reader is encouraged to go on to study the published works of the thinkers themselves

On boundaries and disciplines: constructing a set of key systems thinkers

Over the past four years, the Open University has been working on an internal project of systems scholarship, called 'Systems Thinkers'. We have examined the life and work of fifty key thinkers, held discussions on their significance, and are in the process of writing a book and a postgraduate course about these thinkers. This work has raised many interesting questions about the boundaries of systems as an intellectual and practical discipline. In this paper, we will discuss some of these questions, asking what it means to be a discipline and how to establish its boundaries

Evaluating groupware support for software engineering students

Software engineering tasks, during both development and maintenance, typically involve teamwork using computers. Team members rarely work on isolated computers. An underlying assumption of our research is that software engineering teams will work more effectively if adequately supported by network-based groupware technology. Experience of working with groupware and evaluating groupware systems will also give software engineering students a direct appreciation of the requirements of engineering such systems. This research is investigating the provision of such network-based support for software engineering students and the impact these tools have on their groupwork. We will first describe our experiences gained through the introduction of an asynchronous virtual environment ­ SEGWorld to support groupwork during the Software Engineering Group (SEG) project undertaken by all second year undergraduates within the Department of Computer Science. Secondly we will describe our Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) module which has been introduced into the students' final year of study as a direct result of our experience with SEG, and in particular its role within Software Engineering. Within this CSCW module the students have had the opportunity to evaluate various groupware tools. This has enabled them to take a retrospective view of their experience of SEGWorld and its underlying system, BSCW, one year on. We report our findings for SEG in the form of a discussion of the hypotheses we formulated on how the SEGs would use SEGWorld, and present an initial qualitative assessment of student feedback from the CSCW module

So what's a metaproject for?

Curious Reader: So what's the point of this paper? Author: To give readers a sense of how the Systems Discipline sees the coherence of its course provision, and how those ideas are developing. Curious Reader: And that's called a metaproject? Funny term. Author: It's been kicking around in the Systems Discipline for a few years. The idea is partly to ensure that there's a common thread within all our courses (from level 1 to postgraduate) and partly to create common elements which can be reused within several courses. It also relates to commonality in our research, consultancy, external workshops etc. Curious Reader: Sounds like a recipe for lots of arguments! Author: Yes, and they–re still going on - the paper outlines the dialogue that has happened within the Discipline, and forms part of that dialogue itself. And it's written (as you might have noticed) in the form of a dialogue ï¿

Norbert and Gregory: Two strands of cybernetics

In this article, I shall examine the way in which information was central to the development of cybernetics. I particularly contrast the different uses of the concept by two key participants in that development – Norbert Wiener, who argued that information was a quasi-physical concept related to the degree of organisation in a system; and Gregory Bateson, who considered information to be a process of human meaning formation. I suggest that these two authors exemplify a hard and a soft strand of cybernetics, present from the start of the field. I trace through these two different interpretations of information as they developed in the cybernetics movement, and on the way they have fed into more recent understandings of information within cybernetics and related fields, especially in family therapy and sociology. I also relate these ideas to the cyborg theory of Donna Haraway and others

On the design of systems-oriented university curricula

This paper proposes a tool called the Systems Education Matrix (SEM) for use in informing the work of developers of systems-oriented curricula at colleges and universities around the world. The SEM was developed by Team 1 at the 2008 IFSR Fuschl Conversation held at Fuschl am See in Austria. In order to manage the complex problems we are dealing with today, systems thinking is essential. It is clear that systems education should be acknowledged as an important 'scientific method' that can help today's society to deal with the complexities of contemporary issues. To serve this role effectively, systems education needs to be focused towards the various needs that exist. The members of Team 1 have focused on the nature of systems education that will be required to not only train systems specialists, but to make systems thinking and analysis an integral part of discipline focused research and management