Design of Web Based Information Systems - New Challenges for Systems Development?

The web-technology is going through major changes these years, both with respect to types of systems based on web-technology, organization of the development work, required approaches and competencies, etc. We must rethink the organization of the development work. This requires a deeper and coherent understanding of the nature of web-development. This paper presents findings from a field study undertaken in a webdevelopment company. From these findings we characterize web-application development and discuss some major challenges to cope with and to find proper support for in the future. We found that web-development is characterized by involvement of many expertise groups with little training and experience in information systems design, that some of the existing modeling and communication tools introduce severe problems, and that the pace of the introduction of new tools and features causes development and management problems. A further complication factor is that web-applications of today often are business critical systems