External forces such as deregulation, new competitors, and shifting alliances have contributed to the pervasive changes in many organizations. To cope with it, flexible, adaptable information systems are needed because rigid, inflexible systems are serious obstacles to organizational effectiveness and success.
One way to develop flexible, adaptable information systems is to develop them using the object-oriented approach. This is because we can reuse objects, changing them without directly affecting other objects, and so on. Unfortunately, this approach is not that easy to implement because it is unclear what is the right set of objects and which one we can reuse given a specific case. We believe that the business model can be used to resolve these challenges.
In this presentation, we will describe our experience on how we go about to model the business, to tie it to the existing IS implementation, and to use it to guide changes.
About the speaker: Carson Woo is an Associate Professor and 1997/98 Acting Division Chair of Management Information Systems in the Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration, an Associate Member of the department of Computer Science, and an Associate Member of the Centre for Integrated Computer Systems Research (CICSR), The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He received his B.Sc. (1981), M.Sc. (1983), and Ph.D. (1988) degrees in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.
Professor Woo's research centers on modelling and on building organizational computing systems (OCS). An OCS is a computer-based system that supports an organization as a community of independent agents cooperating to achieve organizational goals. His approach is based on integrating theories from the Social Sciences (e.g., speech act theory in linguistics and commitment theory in sociology and socio-psychology) with techniques from Computer Science (e.g., default reasoning, object-oriented concepts, and blackboard architecture). Examples of organizational activities he is interested in supporting are detecting and resolving conflicts, supporting negotiation, handling requests, making commitments, and designing and reengineering business process or workflow. In addition to his OCS work, Professor Woo is also interested in applying speech act theory, ontology, and object-oriented concepts to information systems analysis and design.
Referent: Prof. Dr. Carson Woo
Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration
University of British Columbia
2053 Main Mall
Vancouver, B.C.
Canada V6T 1Z2
Zeitpunkt: Mittwoch, 9. Dezember 1998, 16 Uhr s. t.
Ort: HS 10 der Universität Klagenfurt (Mensagebäude)