Information systems theory

摘要

The overview presented covers a wide spectrum of aspects on information systems. Consequently, we had to be very brief and for detailed definitions and discussions we must refer the interested reader to the underlying literature. We have described how information systems present complex problems to their designers and we argued that it is hardly possible for any one individual to acquire (and continuously update) sufficient skill over the whole spectrum of problems. It is shown how the partitioning of the design task into two major areas, the infological or behavioral area on the one hand and the datalogical and computer technology oriented area on the other hand, makes it possible to combine the skills of two (or more) groups of people. In addition, the users are to be directly involved in the (infological part of) design. Development in the “infological area”, as surveyed in the paper, has brought us to the situation where it is possible to apply a documentation technique that is computer independent and intelligible to the lay users in its infological parts and yet is precise enough to the data and program design stage. Actual research problems in the infological area are associated with how one could develop the understanding and the motivation of the users so that they can better exploit the possibility to control the design process that is now offered to them. Such research is not covered by the paper. Development in the “datalogical area”, as presented has increased the possibilities for using computers as aid to the designers and to base the design on more system-wide information. A research field which is presently of high interest, but not presented in the paper, is the development of more formalized methods for handling the interface between the infological and the datalogical design stages. Such research is presently making promising progress in combining recent results from “structured programming” and ”structured information analysis”.