Making Work System Principles Visible and Usable in Systems Analysis and Design

With the increasing integration between information systems and the work systems they support, methods that focus on computerized aspects of information systems but skim over the work system are increasingly inadequate. To address work system issues, systems analysis and design methods should apply general principles that help in assessing likely positive and negative impacts of conceivable changes in the information system and/or work system. Such principles apply to the operation of systems in organizations, not to processes for analyzing systems. This paper presents a set of work system principles and gives initial examples illustrating how EMBA students have applied those principles within preliminary analyses of real world systems in business organizations. The principles come from a variety of sources including the sociotechnical literature, TQM, and comments about previous sets of principles. Future research will attempt to improve the set of principles through additional literature searches and through feedback from users.