Steven Alter | University of San Francisco (original) (raw)

Papers by Steven Alter

This paper explores linkages between work system theory (WST) and central concerns of the SIGPrag... more This paper explores linkages between work system theory (WST) and central concerns of the SIGPrag community related to theorizing the IT artifact and its organizational and societal context. The first part of the paper provides background about the development, basic ideas, and underlying premises of WST. In addition to summarizing older facets of WST, it summarizes three new extensions of WST, a service value chain framework for looking at service systems in terms of service concepts, a metamodel (Alter, 2010a) for looking at work systems in more depth than is supported easily by the work system framework, and a concept classification matrix (Alter, 2010e) that can support analysis and design activities and that might provide a way to organize a body of knowledge for the IS field. The second part of the paper returns to the questions about the fit and synergy between WST and the interests of the SIGPrag community. While it is clear that WST fits with central themes in pragmatist IS interests and research, such as usefulness, action, change, and knowledge, the potential synergy between WST and existing research topics in the SIGPrag community is not obvious.

EMISA Forum, 2018

Enterprise modeling (EM) applies abstraction in creating simplified representations of complex re... more Enterprise modeling (EM) applies abstraction in creating simplified representations of complex realities. Unfortunately, both the realities and the task of creating valid conceptual representations bring daunting challenges. Complexity is increasing, e.g. the transition of conventional production towards product-service systems operating in heterogeneous enterprise ecosystems. Simultaneously, modeling methods and tools tend to be formal and inflexible, and often are designed for automated model processing rather than for helping business professionals understand business situations. The result is the current, unsatisfying state of enterprise modeling, in which models can be developed and used directly only by modeling experts and are largely impenetrable to non-experts. This paper presents a set of principles that suggest directions for progress toward genuinely flexible, controllable, and usable enterprise models. The principles accept the relaxation of some expectations about ente...

We undertake an exploratory case study to investigate how warehouse employees work around an Ente... more We undertake an exploratory case study to investigate how warehouse employees work around an Enterprise Resource Planning software that cannot be used as designed due to work practices required by local conditions. Our research illustrates how long-standing approaches to studying IS innovation, adoption and diffusion in relation to fixed IT artefacts say little or nothing about important phenomena and practical issues. We draw on theories of work systems and IT innovation, adoption and adaptation to explain both why workarounds are required and how they are enacted. Our context involves the local Hong Kong operations of a global retailer of home textiles. Our 29 interviews at the site reveal many perspectives about how an inadequate information system failed to support essential work practices and how employees at the site responded by creating shadow IS that helped them pursue their business responsibilities and objectives. We draw on a compliance view of technology use to suggest ...

Service science is still in a formative stage, with many basic ideas still in flux and significan... more Service science is still in a formative stage, with many basic ideas still in flux and significant disagreements about definitions and implications of basic concepts. This paper suggests directions for progress in relation to eight problematic areas within service science. It uses five typical medical services to question typical definitions of service and service system. It suggests that service science should not privilege servitizing over productizing; that a series of design dimensions whose endpoints are often associated with products or with services are more useful than yes/no distinctions between products and services; that the concept of "the customer" should be replaced with clearer identification of different groups and types of customers; that value co-production by customers and co-creation by providers are optional characteristics of services; that assumptions about the importance of the intentions and variability of service system participants should be clarified; and that better balance between analytical rigor and the spirit of service is often needed. As a starting point for addressing these challenges, the concluding section identifies premises underlying an integrated view of service marketing, service operations, and service computing.

discussions of digital transformation as an umbrella term for digitization and automation typical... more discussions of digital transformation as an umbrella term for digitization and automation typically clarify little unless underlying ideas are defined. A similar issue applies to service management because different observers have quite different ideas about the meaning of service and service management. This brief commentary applies work system theory as the core of actionable ideas about service management and digital transformation. It presents ideas from series of papers related to service and service systems (Alter 2008; 2012; 2017a; 2017b). Overall, it tries to go beyond hype about digital transformation by summarizing practical ideas that can be used in service management in a world that relies increasingly on digitization and automation.

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2018

Enterprise Architecture is the process of translating business vision into strategy. Hence, Enter... more Enterprise Architecture is the process of translating business vision into strategy. Hence, Enterprise Modeling is the process of translating an organization's strategic intent into mandated socio-technological innovation projects required to reach an agreed future state of the firm's operation. This paper uses four longitudinal case studies at DHL Express Europe to introduce a significant paradigm shift to modeling of the enterprise at the work system level as an abstract representation of the desired future state of the enterprise. This representation specifies in full the business capabilities serving current and future customer needs and the work system configuration enhancements needed to satisfy the customer needs. The associated project has four p steps: 1) Assessment of Status Quo, 2) Agreeing on the desired End-State, 3) Evolution of legacy work-systems, 4) Removal of Obsolete components. This process model explicitly includes the necessity to search for, address and remove all strategic, financial, operational and technical legacy issues identified during the baseline of the status quo. Enterprise Architects should be embedded in each implementation project for Project Assurance purposes in order to monitor the delivery of the agreed end-state.

AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 2010

This research commentary on Future Directions for HCI Research responds to research commentaries ... more This research commentary on Future Directions for HCI Research responds to research commentaries on the same topic by Benbasat (2010) and Lyytinen (2010), and to two articles in Volume 1 of the AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (Galletta and Zhang, 2009; Zhang et al. 2009). It employs a two-dimensional framework for exploring the scope and challenges of HCI that combines a social/ technical dimension and a behavior dimension that emphasizes differences between engineered and emergent behavior in sociotechnical systems. This framework is used to reflect on possible differences between the scope of a definition of HCI in those articles and the scope of the topics identified in the extensive survey of HCI literature reported by Zhang and colleagues (2009). Implications include the possibility that future HCI research and theorizing may find significant opportunities related to "designing for emergence," or even "engineering for emergence." WHAT IS THE SCOPE OF HCI? This research commentary was motivated by an invitation from the AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (THCI) to share views on Future Directions for HCI Research. It responds to research commentaries on that topic by Benbasat (2010) and Lyytinen (2010) and to two articles in Volume 1 of the AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, an introduction of THCI as a new journal (Galletta and Zhang, 2009) and a survey of HCI research (Zhang et al., 2009). The survey examined articles in eight selected journals and in other selected sources from 1990 to 2008. It classified 693 of 2302 IS research articles in the sample as HCI articles, roughly 30% of the IS articles. If the sample of IS articles is representative, HCI research comprises around 30% of IS research. While I never considered myself an HCI researcher, the broad definition of HCI used by Galletta and Zhang (2009) and Zhang and colleagues (2009) made me wonder about how my research fits into HCI and how HCI fits into IS in general. Galletta and Zhang (2009) said that THCI addresses IS issues and concerns, but with a "specific focus on the history, reference disciplines, theories, practice, methodologies and techniques, new developments, and applications of the interaction between humans, information, technologies, and tasks, especially in the business, managerial, organizational, and cultural contexts" (p. 8). That rather expansive view of HCI topics overlaps substantially with definitions of other topics related to IS in general rather than HCI in particular:

Electronic Markets, 2019

Innovation in the medical technology (med tech) industry has a major impact on well-being in soci... more Innovation in the medical technology (med tech) industry has a major impact on well-being in society. Open innovation has the potential to accelerate the development of new or improved healthcare solutions. Building on work system theory (WST), this paper explores how a multi-sided open innovation platform can systematically be established in a German med tech industry cluster in situations where firms had no prior experience with this approach. We aim to uncover problems that may arise and identify opportunities for overcoming them. We performed an action research study in which we implemented and evaluated a multi-sided web-based open innovation platform in four real-world innovation challenges. Analyzing the four different challenges fostered a deeper understanding of the conceptual and organizational aspects of establishing the multi-sided open innovation platform as part of a larger work system. Reflecting on the findings, we developed five design principles that shall support the establishment of multi-sided open innovation platforms in other contexts. Thus, this paper contributes to both theory and practice.

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2005

The challenge of defining the domain and core concepts of the IS field is a perennial topic at ma... more The challenge of defining the domain and core concepts of the IS field is a perennial topic at major IS conferences. This paper describes the architecture of Sysperanto, a model-based ontology of the IS field. Sysperanto is being developed as part of an ongoing effort to create methods that typical business professionals can use to analyze systems and system-related projects for themselves at whatever level of depth is appropriate. The name Sysperanto is meant as a metaphor combining generality (covering the IS field), vocabulary (identification of terms), and structure (internally consistent organization) to create an ontology more powerful and useful than a list of keywords or propositions. Sysperanto's architecture provides an organizing framework for codifying the disparate and inconsistent propositions, methods, and findings that constitute the current state of IS knowledge and, in combination, form a major obstacle to knowledge accumulation and use in the IS field.

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2003

Debates about the core and the scope of the IS field and about whether the core and scope are rel... more Debates about the core and the scope of the IS field and about whether the core and scope are related to a crisis in the field have smoldered for many years. This article is a response to ten articles submitted by members of the CAIS Editorial Board who accepted an invitation to contribute to a debate about the core and scope of the IS field. Those articles were written as responses to Benbasat and Zmud's [2003] article "The Identity Crisis Within the IS Discipline: Defining and Communicating the Discipline's Core Properties" and my rebuttal [Alter 2003b] entitled "Sidestepping the IT Artifact, Scrapping the IS Silo, and Laying Claim to "Systems in Organizations." Taxonomy of workarounds Research about conceptual modeling Inefficiencies caused by workarounds or lack of workarounds Research about IT economics Workarounds as evidence of resistance to change Research about resistance to IS Creativity in imagining workarounds or in recognizing unwanted workarounds Research on systems analysis and design methods Ability to detect unwelcome workarounds Research about data and system integrity Workarounds in work flow systems Research about making workflow technologies more flexible and effective. Analogy between supply chain workarounds and IS security breaches Research about making procedures more reliabile and about security breaches

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2001

Audience comments about a debate at ICIS200 [Alter et al., 2001] related to ebusiness and the fun... more 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 particular set of concepts captures what is truly fundamental within a diverse and rapidly evolving field, the attempt to identify these concepts challenges the reader to ask "If this isn't the way to identify fundamental concepts, what is the way to do that? If these aren't the fundamental concepts, what is a better set of fundamental concepts and why?" This article's overarching theme is that the fundamental concepts of information systems are mostly fundamental concepts of work systems in general. The article defines "fundamental concept" and discusses various considerations for identifying them. It then proposes a set of fundamental concepts organized in several layers. The first layer concentrates on the elements needed to summarize a work system. The second layer adds concepts that constitute a general vocabulary for describing, understanding, and evaluating work systems. Each concept in the second layer is related to a specific concept in the first layer. Are the Fundamental Concepts of Information Systems Mostly About Work Systems? by Steven Alter Since an information system is a special case of a work system, every fundamental concept of work systems should at least apply to information systems and might be a fundamental concept of information systems. Similarly for work system projects and information system projects, both of which are also special cases of work systems. The article argues that the fundamental concepts of work systems should be viewed as fundamental concepts for all three special cases and then concludes with a number of questions about that the reader might want to consider concerning the approach the article takes and the particular fundamental concepts that are identified.

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2002

In the rapidly changing field of information systems, every researcher faces important choices ab... more In the rapidly changing field of information systems, every researcher faces important choices about what research topics to explore and how to pursue that research. This paper addresses these questions by summarizing a panel discussion at the 2001 Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) annual meeting. The first part of this paper provides a framework explaining factors that can be used in selecting research topics. Then we explain how our own past choices of research topics reflect the factors in the framework. In the final section, we use the framework to speculate about promising research topics for the future.

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2003

In an important ISR research commentary, Orlikowski and Iacono [2001] argue that the IS field doe... more In an important ISR research commentary, Orlikowski and Iacono [2001] argue that the IS field does not deeply engage in its core subject matter, "the IT artifact." Although agreeing with their analysis and their conclusions concerning the unfortunate lack of engagement with the IT artifact, this article questions their premise that the IT artifact should be viewed as the core of the IS field. After defining the term "work system" and summarizing previously published frameworks for understanding a work system in operation and a work system life cycle, this article presents 18 reasons why IT-reliant work systems should replace "the IT artifact" as the core of the IS field. Taken in combination, the 18 reasons express a belief that today's IS field is inherently work system-centric, rather than IT-centric even though IT artifacts are present wherever the IS discipline is genuinely relevant. The specific reasons involve important topics including IS success, IS costs, IS risks, IS life cycles, methods for analyzing systems, communication with business professionals, organizing and codifying knowledge about systems in organizations, and maximizing the value of IS research.

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2002

The work system method is a broadly applicable set of ideas that use the concept of "work system"... more The work system method is a broadly applicable set of ideas that use the concept of "work system" as the focal point for understanding, analyzing, and improving systems in organizations, whether or not IT is involved. The premises underlying this method may be controversial in the IS community because they imply that the traditional jargon and concerns of IS practitioners and researchers address only part of the issues that should be covered and may discourage focusing on other core issues related to successful projects and systems. The work system method includes both a static view of a current (or proposed) system in operation and a dynamic view of how a system evolves over time through planned change and unplanned adaptations. The static view is based on the "work system framework," which identifies the basic elements for understanding and evaluating a work system. This framework is prescriptive enough to be useful in describing the system being studied, identifying problems and opportunities, describing possible changes, and tracing the likely impacts as those changes propagate to other parts of the system. The dynamic view is based on the "work system life cycle model," which shows how a work system may evolve through multiple iterations of four phases. The static and dynamic views are used together in a principle-based systems analysis method that treats the information system as part of the work system until a final step when it distinguishes between work system changes that do and do not involve the information system.

Organizational Design and Enterprise Engineering, 2017

This paper explains how organizational design/ enterprise engineering can be viewed as an operati... more This paper explains how organizational design/ enterprise engineering can be viewed as an operational work system that produces designs, models, and/or specifications along with the related understandings, discussions, and commitments. It applies a work system lens to visualize a typical work system that performs organizational design/ enterprise engineering. It uses the same lens to identify possibilities for research on the related topics.

This paper explores the possibility that compliance and noncompliance to process specifications, ... more This paper explores the possibility that compliance and noncompliance to process specifications, software usage procedures, business rules, and best practices could be beneficial or detrimental. After introducing different types of compliance and noncompliance, it uses a simple 2 x 2 matrix to postulate four types of situations: beneficial compliance, detrimental compliance, beneficial noncompliance, and detrimental noncompliance. It provides examples that illustrate subcategories within all four possibilities, thereby bringing into question the common assumption that compliance is beneficial and noncompliance is detrimental. It presents a model that explains decisions related to intentions toward compliance and noncompliance. It concludes with implications for management and for systems analysis and design. An underlying theme throughout is that beneficial noncompliance and detrimental compliance can be viewed as expected paths to unintended consequences.

Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling, 2015

Idealized system design produces requirements reflecting management intentions and "best practice... more Idealized system design produces requirements reflecting management intentions and "best practices." This paper proposes a workaround design system (WDS) for anticipating, designing, and/or preventing workarounds that bypass systems as designed. A WDS includes a process and an interactive "workaround design tool" (WDT) for identifying and evaluating foreseeable workarounds based on work system theory and a theory of workarounds. This paper summarizes the conceptual background and explains the form, use, and implications of the proposed WDS and WDT. The idea of WDS addresses significant gaps in practice and research. Designers should have methods for identifying likely obstacles and anticipating and evaluating a non-trivial percentage of plausible workarounds. Methods for identifying workarounds might help in training work system participants. Researchers might use WDS to explore why specific responses to obstacles did or did not occur. The lack of methods related to anticipating, designing or preventing workarounds implies that WDS may prove fruitful even though it is impossible to anticipate all possible workarounds.

IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing

Service Science, 2012

This paper presents a metamodel that addresses service system analysis and design based on an ope... more This paper presents a metamodel that addresses service system analysis and design based on an operational view of service that traverses and integrates three essential layers: service activities, service systems, and value constellations. The metamodel's service-in-operation perspective and underlying premises diverge from a view of service systems as systems of economic exchange that has appeared a number of times in the journal Service Science. In addition to the metamodel itself, this paper's contributions include an explanation of eight premises on which it is based plus clarifications concerning concepts such as service, service system, customer, product/service, coproduction and cocreation of value, actor role, resources, symmetrical treatment of automated and nonautomated service systems, and the relationship between service-dominant logic and service systems. Many articles have discussed these topics individually; few, if any, have tied them together using an integra...

EMISA Forum, 2018

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2018

AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 2010

Electronic Markets, 2019

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2005

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2003

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2001

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2002

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2003

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2002

Organizational Design and Enterprise Engineering, 2017

Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling, 2015

IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing

Service Science, 2012

Communications of the Association for Information Systems , 2021

This conceptual contribution introduces the idea of “facets of work” and explains how it can be a... more This conceptual contribution introduces the idea of “facets of work” and explains how it can be applied to challenges in today’s IS discipline. The notion of facets of work emerged from earlier attempts to bring more knowledge and richer, more evocative ideas to SA&D. Focusing on facets of work during initial discussions of requirements could provide guidance without jumping prematurely to details, precision, and formal notation needed for producing testable software. The introduction explains the paper’s goal and organization. The next section defines facet of work, identifies underlying assumptions and criteria, and explains how 18 facets of work were identified. Three examples amplify the initial understanding of facets of work by showing how all 18 facets could be applied to specific situations. The next two sections discuss consolidating basic knowledge about facets of work, making that knowledge more accessible, and applying it in SA&D and in future research. The Appendix explains the disconnected steps that led to the current facets of work. It also presents six lengthy tables that each cover one aspect or another of the 18 facets. Some of those tables form the basis of the tools, methods, and future research mentioned in earlier in the paper.