Workshop 1
Morning 10:00 - 13:00 Removing Arbitrariness from Design Schemas to Improve Information Systems Quality with Professor Ronald Stamper, the founder of Organisational Semiotics and Yasser Ades, Senior lecturer at the University of Greenwich.
Topics:
Recent advances in Organisation Semiotics
Semantic Normal Form (SNF)
Application of SNF to requirements engineering
SNF related software
This half-day expert guided workshop provides a unique opportunity for participants to learn about the latest research in a key theory in the Organisational Semiotics discipline from its founder Prof Ronald Stamper and his associate Yasser Ades.
Organisational Semiotics research led to the discovery of the Semantic Normal Form (SNF), as a stable, empirical property of the human use of information. Most schemas include many arbitrary design choices, which should be removed. When applied to Requirements Specification, the SNF brings marked improvements in the design, development and evolution of business information systems. Empirical research traces two endemic problems to the user requirement specification: the risk of IT project failure and the high cost of software evolution. The workshop will reveal these problems and show how the SNF contributes to solving them.
Before the meeting: participants will be presented with a UML schema and invited to consider:
what could go wrong as organisational requirements evolve
how those problems could be avoided and ideally,
forward their solutions to the workshop organisers.
Presenters:
Ronald Stamper
Studied at Oxford University, worked in Hospital Administration and the Steel Industry where he created the first European courses in Information Systems Analysis and Design outside the computer industry. Then, in 1969, joining the team at the London School of Economics that created teaching and research programmes in ISAD, he began looking for rigorous tools for treating organisations as information systems. Most of the key theoretical ideas had been developed before he moved in 1988 to the Chair of Information Management at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. There and at other centres, the theory was subjected to harsh testing in the analysis and design of a wide range of different organisational problems and computer applications. His team inaugurated this series of OS meetings in 1996. He retired in 1999 but remains very active, currently on the final editing of a book on semantics.
Yasser Ades
Studied Computer Science at the Australian National University and worked with the Australian government where he designed the customs intelligence system and led the development of an integral data warehouse for customs in 1985. His most important contribution, however, was in the quality assurance of the customs enterprise data model - the blueprint of the largest IS project in Australia at the time. Yasser later studied Information Systems at the London School of Economics where he was exposed to Prof. Stamper's semantic theory - the SNF. He quickly recognised its value in quality assurance and project management. In 1987 he built the first major SNF-compliant system - a university student administration system. Since 1988 he has been working with Prof. Stamper to test and refine the SNF theory and associated analytical tools and technology. His principal contribution has been in articulating how SNF can improve our understanding of software quality and reduce IS project risks. He is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Greenwich where teaches requirements & business analysis and project management.