Informing Systems in Business Environments: A Purpose-Focused View

This paper presents a technology-independent rational inquiry into informing systems in business environments. Depending on the primary concerns, informing systems should be examined from either the viewpoint of information disseminators or informing clients. The latter viewpoint is subject to extensive empirical studies within informing science and partially within the MIT Information Quality Program. It focuses mainly on information products, services, users’ preferences, and requirement specifications. The information disseminators’ viewpoint is rarely taken into account. Based on a short review of the most popular MIS textbooks and research in this domain, this paper discusses problems one encounters during examination of informing systems in business environments. It uses an improved version of the purpose-focused framework (Gackowski, 2004a), which covers both viewpoints. Two refinements of the Informing Science Framework as defined by Cohen (1999) are suggested.