Taxis — A Conceptual Model to Support the Early Stages of the ISD Process

Abstract

During the information systems development (ISD) process, after the analysis of the organizational system, it is necessary to define the requirements for the computer based information systems (CBIS) that should be developed, in order to support organizational work. Normally, at this stage, it is assumed that CBIS are undifferentiated. However there are different types of CBIS that provide different functionality, deal with different types of information and support different kinds of organizational work. ISD methodologies do not consider differentiated suggestions to the development of different types of CBIS. It can be argued that, being aware of the type of system to be developed system developers could increase their efficacy. Such an approach to the ISD process demands a systematic and complete description of the different types of CBIS, i.e., a taxonomy of CBIS, that takes into account their functionality, the information they handle, and the processes they support. This paper presents TAXIS, taxonomy of information systems, supported by two. fundamental dimensions: processes support and content support and describes how the taxonomy can be used to support the early stages of the ISD process.