1st Edition
Organisational Semiotics for Business Informatics
Drawing meaningful conclusions from organisational data is challenging, and theoretical frameworks can often illuminate information in fresh and useful ways. This book is one of the first to demonstrate how organisational semiotics can be applied to business informatics and information systems.
Semiotics, a long-established discipline of signs, offers a rich philosophical and theoretical foundation for understanding information systems. This book demonstrates how applying the framework of semiotics to an organisation can provide insights into its communication needs, and as a result, enhance the design of its information system. The authors demonstrate how organisations collect, process, represent, store and consume information through a complex system which is aligned to support its objectives and enhance performance.
Organisational Semiotics for Business Informatics clearly introduces the basic principles and describes a set of methods and techniques rooted in organisational semiotics. These have been applied to business applications; demonstrated through real life case studies. This ground-breaking book has the potential to transform the theoretical understanding of information systems into the basis of a scientific discipline.
1.Introduction Part I: Organisational Semiotics 2.Understanding Sign and Semiotics 3.The Organisational Semiotics Framework for Business Informatics 4.Requirements Engineering in Information Systems Development 5.Informatics in Business Context 6.Organisational Modelling for Information Systems 7.Modelling Organisational Dynamics: Communications, Pragmatics and Norms 8.Organisations as Information Systems Part II: Applications 9.Information Systems Planning 10.Co-Design of Business and Technical Systems 11.Case Study: Systems Planning for Police Organisational 12.Case Study 2: Legacy Systems Re-Engineering for University Libraries 13.Information Systems to Support Business in Digital Age
Biography
Professor Kecheng Liu is Director of the Informatics Research Centre, Henley Business School at Reading, UK. He is a leading figure in Organisational Semiotics with extensive research into information systems and business informatics over the past 20 years.
Dr Weizi Li is a lecturer in business informatics, University of Reading, UK. Since completing her PhD in applied semiotics in systems architecture for digital hospitals, her research has focussed on co-design methodology for business and IT systems
‘In this elegant book, Kecheng Liu and Weizi Li provide a matured perspective and distil their considerable research base arrived at over many years. They achieve the considerable feat of a very clear rendering of semiotics, then show its application in researching and improving business informatics practice. The accelerating digitization we live with requires semiotics tools for its study; this intervention is timely and important.’ - Professor Leslie Willcocks, Department of Management, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
‘This deeply academic book provides the means to understand the complexities and difficulties of language and communications in Requirements Engineering which have so often resulted in challenged or failed information systems projects. It complements many previous socio-technical approaches to requirements capture and provides the foundation for understanding why, how and when they work. The final three chapters provide excellent examples of Organisational Semiotics applied to the real world, through a wide range of valuable case studies and contextual analyses.’ - Richard J Self, Senior Lecturer in Analytics and Governance, University of Derby, UK
‘This book considers a highly important issue of business-IT alignment from the view point of organisational semiotics. The author demonstrates quite rare deep understanding of differences between traditional computer science and business informatics. The book contains full coverage of fundamental principles of semiotics blended with practical aspects of requirements engineering and organisational modelling. It makes this source very useful during scientific research and design of information systems for various groups of readers: PhD students, scholars, business analysts and IT professionals.’ - Eduard BABKIN, Professor, National Research University "Higher School of economics", Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
