Risk Identification Information Systems Development and Delivery

Question : Identify what areas in the chapter (Info Systems J (2004) 14, 313342) are most at risk - or challenging for information systems professionals. Be specific, and support your critique/assertions with references from other articles, blogs or forms of referenced testimony [cite all sources used]. Include a 'References Cited" section. Answer : The section 3, of the article proposes a coding system so that the ISD process knowledge can be organized. A lot of literature and knowledge has been generated in the past 40 years in terms of ISD. However it is not easy to develop a coding system. There are several issues in developing a unified coding system. There are a number of ISD methods and this creates a representation problem. Besides that it is not worthwhile to expect that there will be only a single ISD approach. There are a number of information systems. There is need to develop a variety of information systems, because different ISD approaches will result in more variety and will provide more features. The ISD can be developed in a number of ways. However each development method has its limitations. Some of the approaches may be more general, while some of the approaches may be too focused. It is difficult to prepare a classification tree without clear understanding of the different ISD methods. However the list of the various ISD methods is not exhaustive. It is also necessary to include failed ISD projects as inclusion of the failed ISD cases may result in new insights that could help us avoiding the repeated errors. Thus knowledge of various ISD methods will increase the success rate of development of coding system. The development of coding system needs creation of a hierarchy. However creation of hierarchy is not an easy task as knowledge provided by various ISD may be contradictory or conflicting. Another issue is that the hierarchy and so the BoK cannot be static, as the arena of IT is ever changing. Thus the coding system cannot be a fixed coding system and there should be room for changes as and when required. When a new ISD approaches in generated, the coding system should be able to incorporate it. Another aspect is the collection of the literature for the purpose of coding. It is a herculean task and there should be parameters for choosing the relevant literature. Thus the articles which are not online may get ignored, if the parameter does not focus on inclusion of off line articles. Once the literature is collected, the second step is to group various ISD approaches. However it is possible that some of the approaches may be grouped as general approaches and there may be some border line cases while grouping the ISD approaches. As the coding system is still in alpha stage, there are chances of misrepresentations. However the primary goal is to create a coding system and the refinement of the coding system can be done at later stages. Thus the creation of coding system is more of an organization of the ISD systems. The coding system hierarchy may not be as systematic as the botanical classification of the plants and herbs or scientific classification of various chemicals. It appears to be inherent limitation of the IS field that it is both technical as well as behavioral. References Banville, C. Landry, M. (1989) Can the field of MIS be disciplined? Communications of the ACM, 32, 4860. Culnan, M. (1987) Mapping the intellectual structure of MIS, 19801985: a co-citation analysis. MIS Quarterly, 11,341353. Iivari, J. (1991) A paradigmatic analysis of contemporary schools of IS development. European Journal of Information Systems, 1, 249272. Iivari, J., Hirschheim, R. Klein, H. (20002001) A dynamic framework for classifying information systems development methodologies and approaches. Journal of Management Information Systems, 17, 179218. Zwerman, W.L. (1999) Profession/occupation without a history. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 21,6670.