Research Directions on Incorporating Work System Method Ideas in Systems Analysis and Design

The Work System Method And Related Research

The work system method is one of the two existing theoretical frameworks to support teaching of information systems at present. The other approach to introduce the IS field (used predominantly with MBA students) is the IS Interaction Model which focuses on the relationships between IS, their environment and the organization (see Silver et al. (1995). The Work System Method (Alter, 2006c), however, can be used both for IS teaching and research. That distinguishes it from the Interaction Model and makes it suitable for exploring its role in systems analysis. The work system method is an approach for understanding and analyzing systems in organizations including Information Systems (Alter, 2002). Petkov and Petkova (2008) published the results from a controlled experiment showing that it helped students in an introductory IS course to understand better an IS implementation problem.