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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/2451/14508
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| Title: | WORKFLOW AND ORGANIZATIONAL UNIT: AN EMPIRICAL COMPARISON OF ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVES |
| Authors: | Sasso, William C. |
| Issue Date: | Jun-1986 |
| Publisher: | Stern School of Business, New York University |
| Series/Report no.: | IS-86-063 |
| Abstract: | Many processes, techniques, tools, methodologies, and approaches claim
to facilitate the process of information systems development, but little
empirical validation in support of these claims has been publicly
reported. This research addresses this shortcoming in two ways. First,
it develops and applies a promising experimental design for the
comparison of systems analysis techniques. The design's objective was to
external validity of experimental findings while maintaining high
degrees of control and comparability. Secondly, our design, the
"transcript experiment," was used to evaluate two versions of
an analysis procedure. This paper both presents and evaluates the
transcript experiment as a research design and reports the results of an
actual experiment. The study we report investigated the impact of a
particular factor in the systems analysis process, which we term
analysis perspective. After elaborating a (partial) theory of systems
analysis enabling us to predict the impact of different analysis
perspectives on (1) the analysis process, (2) the content of reports it
produces, and (3) the utility of the analystsâ recommendations,
we compared the influences of two particular perspectives, the workflow
perspective and the organizational unit perspective. We observed
significant differences in subject behavior in acquiring information
during the analysis process, but the data were inconclusive with respect
to our predictions concerning the content of reports and the utility of
subjectsâ recommendations. Finally, we noted a strong negative
correlation between the number of recommendations produced by a subject
and the degree to which he documented the current system. We term this
correlation the descriptive/prescriptive tradeoff, and feel it deserves
further study, as it may invalidate a number of widely-held assumptions
concerning the systems design process. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2451/14508 |
| Appears in Collections: | IOMS: Information Systems Working Papers
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