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SERIES EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Vladimir Zwass, Editor-in-ChiEf

The field of Information Systems (IS) shares a disciplinary interest in systems analysis and design
(SA&D) with computer science (CS) and, in particular, with its subfield of software engineering.
The IS discipline focuses on behavioral, cognitive, organizational, economical, and social issues
along with the business-facing technological issues of systems development.
The present volume of Advances in Management Information Systems (AMIS) addresses this
broad set of concerns. Edited and written by some of the leading authorities, the volume’s aim—
consistent with objectives of the AMIS series—is to bring together research work that forms our
thinking about the processes and products of SA&D. For this reason, the volume is organized
around the influential tiered framework that systematizes IS development methodologies (Iivari,
Hirschheim, and Klein, 2000–2001). Thus organized, the work of the volume’s editors and the
researchers who contributed to it makes visible a coherent view of the approaches underlying
SA&D (such as structured development, object orientation, or sociotechnical design), specific
methodologies relying on these approaches, and techniques deployed to develop systems using
these methodologies. The distinct architectural principles for designing complex artifacts that are
IS are discussed and exemplified in the context of satisfying the varied requirements of system
stakeholders.
Demonstrably, we are able to develop and implement ever larger, more complex, and more
pervasive systems. Equally demonstrably, our systems development processes are subject to severe
time and budget overruns as well as implementation failures, and the resulting systems suffer
from a wide array of vulnerabilities and maintainability deficiencies. These facts alone call for
the deeper study of fundamentals of our SA&D approaches, methodologies, and techniques. Well
beyond these factors, the drastically changing environment of software development calls for a
fundamental review and reassessment of our methodologies for this development. The examination
of foundations that is undertaken in the present AMIS volume is thus very important.
The changes are profound and striking, since I last had an opportunity to write my assessment
of the entire SA&D arena some twenty-five years ago (Zwass, 1984). Some of the current principal
overlapping aspects of the ongoing change include:
1. Contemporary information systems are widely distributed. This distribution occurs in
many senses of the word: geographical, organizational, across heterogeneous systems software
and hardware, across diverse enterprise systems, and across heterogeneous databases and data
warehouses.
2. The overall functionality of major IS is actually delivered by systems of systems. These
supersystems have an emergent quality: they have not been (and cannot be, in most cases) planned
and developed as an entity. The obvious example is the Internet–Web compound; other examples
include supply chain management systems that emerge to support the changing constellations of

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