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THE STATE OF SYSTEMS ANALYSIS AND DESIGN RESEARCH 5
Development Life Cycle is a well-known artifact of this time, during which the focus of systems
development shifted from hardware and technical constraints to the process itself. Unfortunately,
the focus still did not exert adequate effort in identifying business needs. The methodology era,
encompassing the late 1980s through the late 1990s, saw an explosion of methodologies in a variety
of genres. The methodologies were (more or less) squarely aimed at ameliorating the deficiencies
of the methodological approaches to systems development characterized in the earlier eras. Finally,
from the late 1990s through the present, developers have gradually come to the realization that
strict adherence to any given methodology, no matter how efficacious it might have appeared in
success stories about it, could not guarantee the success of the next project it was used for. They
named this the Post-Methodology Era.
Hirschheim and Klein (1989) presented another concept of systems development: paradigmatic
thinking. Their effort developed and created what they called the “four paradigms of systems
development.” They described the first paradigm as functionalism, in which systems develop-
ment was driven from outside, using formal and well-defined plans and tools. The elements of
each system were seen as physical entities, and the structured methodologies could be seen as
examples. Their second paradigm was termed social relativism, which viewed systems develop-
ment as happening from inside. Entities and structures were seen more as changing, dynamic,
or evolutionary in nature. The various ethnographic systems development methodologies are
examples of this paradigm. The third paradigm was radical structuralism, which emphasizes the
need to overthrow or transcend the limitations placed on existing social and organizational ar-
rangements. This underlines the structure and analysis of economic power relationships. The last
paradigm, neohumanism, seeks radical change, emancipation, and potentiality, and stresses the
role that different social and organizational forces play in understanding change.
CLASSIFYING CHAPTERS IN THIS VOLUME

The systems development chapters in this volume are grouped into three broad categories: tech-
niques, methodologies, and approaches. This grouping relies on the Iivari, Hirschheim, and Klein
(2001) classification scheme because of the fit between the scheme and the chapters presented
here. While these authors used a four-level hierarchy that includes the above three levels as well
as a paradigm level as an explanatory vehicle, this volume consists of chapters representing only
the lower three levels—techniques, methodologies, and approaches.
The book has four sections based on three categories—techniques, methodologies, and ap-
proaches—because two chapters specifically discuss agent-oriented methodologies. Thus, there
are two sections on methodologies.
Part I. Techniques for Systems Engineering and Requirements Elicitation

Techniques (Iivari, Hirschheim, and Klein, 2001) include the steps necessary for basic op-
erations, and if properly executed, can deliver metrical results. The following chapters in the
volume present exemplary research designed to specify the important components of require-
ments elicitation.
Chapter 2, “Flow-Service-Quality (FSQ) Systems Engineering: A Discipline for Developing
Network-Centric Information Systems” proposes a new engineering framework for reasoning
about and developing systems of systems: the flow-service-quality (FSQ) framework. This
chapter provides rigorous, practical engineering tools and methods to reason about system flows
as first-class objects of specification, design, implementation, and operation. System flows are