Oldies goldies - presentation from 21.3.2003

1. Significance of
customer-dialogue
in ISD
preliminary descripiton of
quasi-scientific research in
an ISD-company
Tämä teos, jonka tekijä on
Pekka Muukkonen, on lisensoitu
Creative Commons Nimeä-JaaSamoin
4.0 Kansainvälinen -lisenssillä

2. Why?
 a large amount of information systems
fail to achieve WANTED and
ANTICIPATED results
 projects exceed allocated resources
 user satisfaction is low

3. Assumpitons for
symptoms (in research environment)
 ISD-process fail in capturing essential
elements of user-context
 Communication between developers
and users is somewhat ’irregular’
 Customer can not evaluate, ie. does
not understand, proposed system
descriptions

4. Support from scientific
world (from the era of the dinosaurs)
 Failures in IS, Lyytinen & Hirscheim
(1987)
 Development process problems
– Communication problems
– Control failures
– View of ISD process
 Different perspectives of IS, Nurminen
(1988)

5. What is ISD?
What is developed?
 social action theory, Hirscheim, Klein,
Lyytinen (1996); Hirschheim, Klein, Newman
(1991)
– Analysis, design, construction, implementation
 Development implies change
– Change of work practices (activity theory)
– Change of structures (structuration theory)
Giddens, Orlikowski, Nurminen

6. Research question?
 presumption: focus in early stages of ISD-
process is most important (since it’s effects
are cumulative)
 Where is the problem in these early stages
(or in these activities)?
 presumption: communication problems in
requirements gathering
 how this could be handled better?
 could dialogue support this?
Backup from previous viewpoints

7. What?
 one approach – participatory design
 user as an expert
 combines social action and gives an angle
to view change
 implies a certain role for a developer
eg. Bödker, Ehn... and a whole bunch of
scandinavic researchers
Namioka & Rao, others - please

8. Participation in ISD
 focus on communication
 analysis – forming the base
– Understanding the situation
 Ethnography, Suchman (1995)
 Non-strategic action, Habermas (19xx)
 Spirit, Mirel (?), Nurminen (1988)
soc ext
int comb
dialogue (collective reflection)
tacit
explicit
t e
Nonaka & Takeuchi
(1995)

9. Participation in ISD
 design – representations of system
 sense-making, H,K,L (1996)
 (boundary objects, Star)
 Problems in both analysis and design
– Fixed views and powergames, usage and form
of representations, eg. Sarkkinen
soc ext
int comb
tacit
explicit
Nonaka & Takeuchi
(1995)
t e
learning by doing

10. Empiric environment
 Background for the ISD-organization
 discipline of customer intimacy
Culture
- client and field driven
- variation: have it your way
mindset
Organization
- enterpreneurial client teams
- high skill in the field
Core processes
- client aquisition & development
- solution development
- flexible and responsive work
procedures
Management systems
- revenue and share of wallet
driven
- rewards based in part on client
feedback
- lifetime value of client analysis
Information technology
- customer databases linking
internal and external information
- knowledge bases built around
expertice

11. Empiric environment
 strategic manifestation of discipline
 From client to client
 (I prefer customer, although client implies the service
nature. Customer – a person or thing of a specified
kind one has to deal with)
 Young, growing, keskisuuri
 Knowledge in development of business
processes, databases, code
 Rather little in information systems – IS
mostly viewed as applications

12. Things to find out
 how successful were projects as projects?
 how ”good” was delivered system?
 how was communication conducted during
ISD?
 what were the representations used?
 14 semistructured interviews, avg. 2,5 hours
each
 Observation in development environment
and informal conversations
 Study of documents

13. Combination of PD &
ISD in this
 One of the main problems in dev.
 From customer to customer?
customer developer
customer developer
customer developer
knowledge about
the (actual and needed)
purpose of an IS
time (=project wasting resources)
usr. env. modeling
(re)design of work
system (solution) proposal
represents the direction of knowledge transfer, Muukkonen (20xx)

14. Back to master’s level
 2 design methodologies (or methods)
– Contextual Design, Beyer & Holtzblatt
– Rational Unified Process, ?
 How these tackle the question
from customer to customer
and on what level?
* What kind of representations these
have?

15. Contextual design
 a socio-technical approach with a hint
of humanistic perspective
 first three phases:
– Contextual inquiry
 Apprentice mentality
– Work modeling, many different
representations on different levels
– Work model consolidation

16. Rational Unified
Process
 more an ”engineering” view to development
 various roles on design team
 based on Use-case models
– starting from business use-case model ending to
detailed system description and an object model
of data
 Purpose to capture what the system should
do from the user’s point of view

17. Comparison
 what are the ontologial assumptions behind
these methods?
 how they help in the communication?
 what is an end-product of these methods?
 How they fit in PD and support the
dialogue?
 What kind of representations are used?
Kyng, M. (1995)
 How these representations facilitate
communication?

18. So where’s the
dialogue anyway?
 And what does it mean?
 Purpose of dialogue
– Share a common view
– Communicate understandably
 Over the whole time of ISD-process

19. Dialogue
 Heikkilä & Heikkilä (2002)
raw debate common discussion skillful discussion dialogue
emphasis on
individual aspects
emphasis on search for
common meaning

20. Dialogue
 Heikkilä & Heikkilä cont.
 Eight views to support interaction (with dialogue)
1 Focus of thought and action towards
relationships and processes instead of rigid
structures and separate tasks
2 Away from external power and control to shared
leadership and sensing inner power
3 Towards search for common meaning from top-
down decision making
4 Away from disruptive competition to co-
operation , co-responsibility an collective thinking

21. Dialogue
5 from controlling oneself to building of
common ownership from diverse views
6 from linear line of thought to open systems
containing relationships and processes
7 from one right solution to multiple solutions
with the help of innovation
8 from dispersed view to holistic
 Organized dialogue is supported by a
facilitator (developer as a such), also
Nurminen (1988) in hum. perspective

22. Dialogue
discussion deliberation
defence
skillful
problem solving
constrained
discussion debate
dialectical
discussion
patience
reflective
dialogue
innovative
dialogue
Isaacs, W. (2001), ”Dialogue and the art of thinking together”

23. Dialogue in methods
 How are the aspects of dialogue
handled in these 2 methods, if at all?
 Yet to resolve – artful integration of
these concepts (or some of them) to
the whole package (meaning this
quasi-research).

24. Thus dialogue is
 a way to conduct oneself
 a way to find shared and common
understanding
 a way to innovate
 a way to direct energy towards
meaningful action
 ....?

25. (Anticipated)
Results
 more focus on the development
context and competent communication
(dialogue) helps to divert the wasting
of energy (power games & such) to
more purposeful action – to build
better systems which suit the task in
hand and even in a way that the user
can use it,if not happy but at least in
content.

26. Agenda
 (for research) treat people as people and
make the world, especially IS-world, a nicer
place to live in 
 (for presentation) find out my reasoning
flaws and receive comments from more
experienced and actual researchers – both
from content and how to deal with it