Abstract
Contemporary development methodologies take a ‘hard’ reductionist view of ‘the system’ and are unable to model the rich gamut of human and organisational complexity adequately. Conversely ‘soft’ methodologies are unable to tackle technical problems satisfactorily. To date, attempts to join the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ approaches have been largely unsuccessful, due to the seemingly mutually exclusive underpinning philosophies of the two approaches. This paper proposes a way of bridging the hard/soft dichotomy through incorporating organisational culture analysis into the systems development process. A cultural meta-model is proposed as a means of ensuring the delivered system is culturally acceptable to the organisation, thereby encouraging system ownership and use by stakeholders.
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Page, S. (1999). The Ontology/Epistemology Dichotomy in Information Systems Development. In: Zupančič, J., Wojtkowski, W., Wojtkowski, W.G., Wrycza, S. (eds) Evolution and Challenges in System Development. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4851-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4851-5_4
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