Sysperanto and the Work System Method

Systems analysis and design methods for business professionals are basically missing from the SA&D universe. Current SA&D techniques are for IT professionals or consultants. Business professionals may participate in projects and approve SA&D by others, but no established techniques directly address their need to: · think about systems without assistance from consultants or IT professionals, · evaluate systems from a business perspective, · participate effectively in system-related projects, · communicate about realities addressed by new or improved information systems. The work system method addresses this void. Successive versions were developed based on feedback from MBA and EMBA students writing papers about systems in their own organizations. The underlying ideas have been presented at ICIS and AMCIS, and in articles in CAIS, CIO Insight, EJIS, and Decision Support Systems. Sysperanto is being developed as a model-based ontology of the IS field. It has two interrelated goals: · supporting the work system method by collecting and organizing a basic vocabulary for analyzing IT-reliant systems from a business viewpoint · creating a highly organized, internally consistent mapping of most of the fundamental concepts in the IS field, thereby codifying knowledge in the field and responding to the recurrent debate about whether the IS field has a conceptual core This tutorial covers the work system framework, work system life cycle model, work system principles, work system method, architecture of Sysperanto, and excerpts from the first version of Sysperanto, and implications of practice and research