This volume contains the proceedings of the 6th International Conference of the BCS Specialist Group on Information Systems Methodologies. The conference brought together papers on methodology issues related to the development and management of emerging technology based information systems. As usual there was a good range of papers addressing the 'soft' and 'hard' aspects of IS development and management. Methodologies for Developing and Managing Emerging Technology-based Information Systems will be of interest to practitioners who are engaged in systems development and modifying or aligning existing methodologies to practice.

This volume is comprised of the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Information Systems Development held August 26th-28th, 2004, at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilnius, Lithuania. The aim of this volume is to provide a forum for the research and practices addressing current issues associated with Information Systems Development (ISD). Every day, new technologies, applications, and methods raise the standards for the quality of systems expected by organizations as well as end users. All are becoming dependent on systems reliability, scalability, and performance. Thus, it is crucial to exchange ideas and experiences, and to stimulate exploration of new solutions. This proceedings provides a forum for both technical and organizational issues.

Technological advancements of the past several decades in computer and telecommunication technologies have had a profound impact upon the fundamental structures of society, and particularly, upon organizations. As these technologies have matured and developed, many organizations have been looking into the organizational and managerial changes that can be made that allow the organization to achieve greater utilization of these technologies to improve their competitive postures.Web-enabled technologies have become a serious contender. Many global organizations are looking into the emerging web-enabled technologies to make their dispersed operations around the world more efficient and maintaining greater control over their resources. Those organizations that have not attempted to identify and master the many applications of web-enabled technologies will have serious difficulty competing and surviving.This book gives you the latest research findings/writings related to the web-enabled technologies utilization and management in organizations throughout the world.

Information Systems: The e-Business Challenge Indisputable, e-Business is shaping the future inspiring a growing range of innovative business models. To bring it to the point: the Internet has redefined the way electronic business is performed. In an electronic supported business all relationships are transformed -may it be a seller-to buyer relationship or a an agency-to-citizen relationship. So for instance in commerce new business models incorporate various activities: promoting and communicating company and product information to a global user base; accepting orders and payments for goods and services; providing ongoing customer support; getting feedback and spurring collaboration for a new product development. There are several ways of further differentiating e-Business such as sketching some diversions on various levels: e-Commerce, e-Government; B2C, B2B, B2G, G2C; Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence and so on. Further distinctions may follow divergent criteria such as separating in business stages. Thus particular problem domains emerge. They all state of its own guiding the development of adequate information systems.

Covers research in the area of systems analysis and design practices and methodologies.

The articles in this book constitute the proceedings papers from the IFIP WG 8.2 Working Conference, "IS2000: The Social and Organizational Perspective on Research and Practice in Information Technology," held June 1 0-12, 2000, in Aalborg, Denmark. The focus of the conference, and therefore this book, is on the basic aim of the working group, namely, the investigation of the interrelationships among four major components: information systems (IS), information technology (IT), organizations, and society. This basic social and organizational perspective on research and practice in information technology may have evolved substantially since the founding ofthe group, for example, increasing the emphasis on IS development. The plan for the conference was partially rooted in the early WG 8.2 traditions, in which working conferences were substantially composed of invited papers. For IS2000, roughly half of the paper presentations were planned to be invited; the remaining half were planned to be double-blind refereed in response to a "Call For Papers." Invited papers were single-blind reviewed in order to provide the authors with pre-publication feedback and comments, along with the opportunity to revise their papers prior to its final incorporation in this book.

Modern society has been transformed by the digital convergence towards a future where technologies embed themselves into the fabric of everyday life. This ongoing merging of social and technological infrastructures provides and necessitates new possibilities to renovate past notions, models and methods of information systems development that accommodates humans as actors within the infrastructure. This shift introduces new possibilities for information systems designers to fulfil more and more everyday functions, and to enhance their value and worth to the user. Reframing Humans in Information Systems Development aims to reframe the phenomenon of human-centered development of information systems by connecting scientific constructs produced within the field of information systems which has recently provided a plethora of multidisciplinary user views, without explicitly defining clear constructs that serve the IS field in particular. IS researchers, practitioners and students would benefit from Reframing Humans in Information Systems Development as the book provides a comprehensive view to various human-centered development methods and approaches. The representatives of the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Supported Collaborative Work will also find this book an excellent resource. A theoretical handbook and collection of practical experiences, are included along with critical discussions of the utilization methods in ISD and their implications with some interconnecting commentary viewpoints.

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.

"This encyclopedia offers a comprehensive knowledge of multimedia information technology from an economic and technological perspective"--Provided by publisher.

Why does information technology disappoint or enslave us? Why do so many information systems projects collapse? How can we do better? There are many technical, social, economic and other aspects to consider. How do we ensure we take all these into account as we research ITC or employ them? ICT affects our lives and world more profoundly than ever before. How may we understand it? This book employs philosophy to lay foundations for understanding the complexity of ICT, in five areas: The nature of information and computers, and artificial intelligence; The use of ICT at work and home, for serious and less-serious use; The ICT features that annoy or delight us; Societal issues, such as surveillance, e-government, ICT in developing countries, climate change, what technological progress is and what is the role of ICT as a whole and of the information systems field; ICT development - including computer programming, knowledge engineering and project management. The ideas in this book emerge from five decades of experience of the author with ICT, across industry, the professions and academic life. Information systems researchers will enjoy this book because it offers them new ideas and fresh perspectives. On the 500th anniversary of the European Reformation, this book introduces and applies the Reformational Philosophy of mid-20th-century Dutch thinker, Herman Dooyeweerd, to contemporary challenges of the 21st century. Excitingly, this accessible philosophy is grounded in everyday experience and yields a rich seedbed of ideas, which researchers and practitioners can develop to their advantage.