Responding to Ongoing Change: Challenges for Information Systems Modeling

As modern organizations increasingly need to operate in uncertain and fast-paced business environments, pressures increase on information systems (IS) to support these enterprises in a dynamically changing world. Consequently, systems need to deliver results given incompletely known and constantly changing requirements and contexts and other uncertainties. Their development is no longer a progression from clear and stable requirements to solutions meeting them. Rather, it is a continuous process involving multiple iterations of analysis and exploration, design, and development taking into consideration changing organizational needs, available resources, and feedback from previous iterations. Since current modeling and analysis notations generally assume stable and predictable settings for IS development, this paper explores the difficulties in applying several such techniques for modeling continuously evolving systems in uncertain and rapidly changing socio-technical domains and identifies requirements for a comprehensive modeling notation suitable for these environments. Business intelligence capability implementation in enterprises is used as an illustration.