Several methodologies, such as Yourdon and OMT, provide us some guidelines while designing and implementing an IS. However, following the guidelines of those methodologies are not always sufficient for understanding the way of working of an organization and for setting up the boundaries for the Universe of Discourse. Constantly changing organization structures and communication channels, has caused to re-think in the way of designing and implementing an IS.
This study focuses on understanding the way of working of an organization through ‘seeing’ the working-processes from the users’ and stakeholders’ perspective by perceiving the world from their eyes by means of participating within the working-domain. This has a major advantage that the organization can be ‘understood’ and the world in consideration, the Universe of Discourse, can be well-defined and stated, even in dynamic and constantly changing organizations, so that the trouble points can be found and eliminated using automation or organizational change.
In order to draw some guidelines for our new approach, the philosophies of known methodologies and approaches have been investigated and used together with our experiences to draw a new framework for understanding using meta-modeling techniques. This has been tested and implemented with a case study which was conducted at Finansbank (Holland) NV in Amsterdam.
Keywords:
Business Engineering, Business Process, Contextual Design, Database Design, Framework, IS Design, Meta-Modeling, Methodology, Rapid Prototyping, Software Design, Universe of Discourse