Are the Fundamental Concepts of Information Systems Mostly About Work Systems?

Are the Fundamental Concepts of Information Systems Mostly About Work Systems?

Audience comments about a debate at ICIS200 [Alter et al., 2001] related to ebusiness and the fundamental concepts of information systems noted that the debate was undercut by the lack of agreement about what are the fundamental concepts. As a follow-on to that debate, this article proposes a set of fundamental concepts for information systems. While there is no bullet-proof way to prove that a...

Information Systems Risks and Risk Factors: Are They Mostly About Information Systems?

This article is the second of two whose goal is to advance the discussion of IS risk by addressing limitations of the current IS risk literature. The first article [Alter and Sherer, 2004] presented a general, but broadly adaptable model of system-related risk that addressed the limited usefulness of existing IS risk models for business managers. In this article, we focus on organizing risk fac...

An Ontological Analysis of some Fundamental Information Systems Concepts

This paper describes how ontological concepts can be used to model information systems. We view an information system as an object that is independent of its use or its technology of implementation. The main premise of the model is that an information system is a representation of a real-world system, and as such it should possess certain characteristics, We show how the model can be used to de...

Complex, Sociotechnical Systems (css): Some Fundamental Concepts

Our interests in ESD.00 are largely focused on complex, sociotechnical systems (CSS)— understanding and improving them and developing methods for representing and designing them. By CSS, we mean (for our purposes here), large-impact, difficult-tounderstand systems that have important technology issues and important societal implications. We will spare you, for now, the myriad definitions of “co...

Fundamental concepts for fault tolerant systems