A Framework for Selection of Information Systems Development Methodologies

Information systems are increasingly becoming regarded as crucial to an organisation's success. A development methodology for an information system is a framework to organize, program and supervise the process of developing an information system. There many are different methodologies for information systems development. Obviously, no methodology can claim that it can be applied to any organisation. Therefore, organisations should have an evaluation framework for selecting an appropriate and efficient methodology. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework for selecting information systems development methodology in order to facilitate the development process of information systems in organisations. In this work, we will describe and compare different hard and soft systems approaches at first, then in the following sections, one kind of methodology's classifications is pointed and one methodology from each class is introduced. Finally, a comparison framework is proposed and methodologies are compared by this framework. The value of this framework is that, with use of it, organisations can evaluate their development methodology with respect to the key features of it before implementing any methodology as well as expending extra costs. This framework is theoretical in nature, and is build based on a review of related literature.