Increasing the benefit of analysis: the case of systems that support communication

Abstract

Researchers in academia and practitioners in the field are concluding that object orientation (OO) supports well the stages of technical design and programming but not the stages of functional analysis and high-level design. Some further suggest that the UML diagrams cannot be used in systems analysis if it is relies on, as it usually should, feedback from the client because of their complexity. We advocate here an approach to analysis that concentrates on a select set of high impact areas of information systems in organizations but develops more sophisticated and theory based models of these focus areas. We demonstrate how this approach can produce a set of rich representations that enable improved modeling based on domain knowledge. We apply these representations to the design of systems that support organizational communication, providing a list of design principles that emerge from this discussion.