Abstract

It is argued that contribution to the theory and practice of the analysis and design of information systems and services within organizational contexts requires the following steps. First, an underlying theoretical domain is needed. Second, the constructs of this domain have to be communicated using some commonly understood “language.” Third, these constructs have to be applied to purposes that are of interest to users, particularly business users. Finally, this application needs to take into consideration the constraints that users work under and, particularly in business, the need for cost effectiveness. It is claimed that the models developed by Bunge, Wand and Weber (BWW models), in particular the representation model, provide a good starting point for this theoretical foundation. In order to communicate the BWW models, an ER-based meta model for the BWW representation model is suggested. A common issue about some of the results with a number of the ontological analyses that have been done so far is the lack of relevance and cost effectiveness. This situation suggests that integrating perspectives into the process of ontological analysis would improve the usefulness of the results to users. Specifically, ensuring the relevance of the results to the different purposes of different users would improve the usefulness of the ontological analysis to users of modeling grammars. Accordingly, the application of a third dimension—the cost effectiveness dimension—to the analysis of modeling grammars using the BWW representation model is investigated. Specifically, the requirements of activity-based costing systems are analyzed as a first example of a perspective.

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