Web IS Development Methodology (WISDM):Is web IS development different?

3.6 Is web IS development different?

In a review of three companies working in Internet time, Baskerville & Pries-Heje (2001) identified ten concepts relevant to IS development for the Internet. We will explore these concepts to gain an insight into the real-world characteristics of web development projects.

Time pressure: Competitive pressures may mean that any advantage is short-lived and will be copied quickly – time is of the essence.

Vague requirements: Requirements are often imprecise or not known at all and have to be created through imagine and innovation.

Prototyping: The software prototype is the specification of requirements rather than the models in a paper-based specification. Fred Brooks' adage noted in chapter 2 that developers should aim to throw one away (''because you will anyway") is particularly pertinent to web-based applications where the requirements are vague and fast changing.

Release orientation: Release early and often – the adage of rapid application development is also highly relevant to Internet projects.

Parallel development: Database development can take place at the same time as the graphical design; requirements analysis and design become hard to separate.

Fixed architecture: Complexity needs to be tamed. A three-tier architecture where the business data, business logic, and the user interface are separated out and this allows team members to work in parallel with a degree of independence.

Coding your way out: When the going gets tough the developers need to code their way out of problems. Hacking was not originally a pejorative term, but was used to identify programmers who could write elegant and effective code quickly (see the 'Hacker Ethos').

Quality is negotiable: Do you want it: good, quick, or cheap. Pick any two. In a sense, quality has always been negotiable. In web-based projects the over-riding view of quality tends to be the customer perspective and experience, rather than by a defined and repeatable development process or a software product that survives an internal audit.

Dependence on good people: Internet projects are completed under time pressure and typically in small teams where all members need to pull their weight. Key staff can make or break a project.

Need for structure: The old structures of systems development, e.g., business analysts separate from software engineers may be inappropriate to building applications in Internet time.

Although the ten concepts capture the emergent aspects of web IS development well, if the term 'business urgency' is substituted for the concept 'Internet time' then it is clear that the ten concepts have a more general relevance to understanding the IS development process. In situations characterized by time pressure and definitional uncertainty the response of IS developers has long been to adopt a flexible strategy to IS development using techniques such as rapid application development and prototyping. However, there are some concrete differences between Internet projects and traditional IS development:

• Internet time The development time is reduced greatly – two years is unthinkable, 6 months is often unacceptable and many significant e-commerce projects are implemented in weeks. This means that the 10 concepts above tend to be the norm rather than the exception.

• Strategic implications The strategic implications are directly related to business goals, particularly in e-commerce projects where a revenue stream is generated.

• Emphasis on graphical user interface There is a need for talented graphic designers to work with software engineers.

• Customer-orientation The user is a customer rather than an employee. E-

commerce applications need customer focus and marketing input. Again, these are not traditional areas of software engineering.

On the other hand, there are also similarities:

• Databases Sophisticated Internet applications rely on databases and require traditional software engineering skills to implement them.

• Integration Internet applications need to be integrated with enterprise applications. For example, a front office car ordering system that gives consumers a delivery date will need to communicate with the back office manufacturing requirements planning (MRP) module of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suite. Tying together the front office and back office business systems – enterprise application integration (EAI) – will continue to be a major challenge to organizations.

As Internet projects become broader in scope requiring greater integration with front office, back office, and legacy IT systems of all sorts, then Internet projects will become yet more difficult to distinguish from traditional IT projects. Traditional IS projects would also benefit from being given more attention to strategy, customers, and design aesthetics and therefore the distinctions should, over time, become less pronounced and even disappear altogether as web-based IS development becomes 'business as usual'.

Summary

• WISDM builds on Multiview and is a contingent approach to IS development that provides a general framework for understanding the triad of analyst, problem situation, and methods.

• The web IS Development Methodology (WISDM) is an emergent property of an instantiation of the triad in practice.

• The IS Development Methods matrix is multi-perspective, being a balance of organizational analysis, information analysis, work design and technical design.

• WISDM requires the developer to construct a particular methodology from these ingredients that is suitable to the situation at hand.

Exercises

1. What are the different situations that might lead to different emphases on organizational analysis, information analysis, work design and technical design in IS development projects.

2. Consider various case studies in IS development. What was the balance struck in terms of organizational analysis, information analysis, work design 

and technical/HCI design? In the light of the project successes and failures, was the correct balance struck?

3. What are the particular features of web development applications that might lead to different aspects being emphasised in a real-world instantiation of WISDM?

Further reading

Avison, D.E. and Wood-Harper, A.T., (1990). Multiview: An Exploration in Information Systems Development. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford.

Avison, D.E., Wood-Harper, A.T., Vidgen, R.T. and Wood, J.R.G., (1998). A Further Exploration into Information Systems Development: the Evolution of Multiview2. Information Technology & People, 11(2): 124–139.

Baskerville, R. and Pries-Heje, J., (2001). Racing the e-bomb: How the Internet is Redefining Information System Development Methodology. In: Russo, L., Fitzgerald, B. and DeGross, J., editors, Realigning Research and Practice in Information System Development, Proceedings of the IFIP TC8/WG8.2 Working Conference, July 27–29, Boise, Idaho, USA.

Himanen, P., (2001). The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. Secker & Warburg, London.

Hirschheim, R., Klein, H.K. and Lyytinen, K., (1996). Exploring the Intellectual Structures of Information Systems Development: a Social Action Theoretical Analysis. Accounting, Management & Information Technology, 6(1/2): 1–64.

Mitroff, I. and Linstone, H., (1993). The Unbounded Mind: Breaking the Chains of Traditional Business Thinking Oxford University Press, New York.

Mumford, E., (1995). Effective Systems Design and Requirements Analysis – the ETHICS approach. Macmillan Press, Basingstoke, UK.

Vickers, G., (1984). The Vickers Papers. Edited by the Open Systems Group.Harper and Row.

Wood-Harper, A.T., Corder, S., Wood, J. and Watson, H., (1996). How We Profess: the Ethical Systems Analyst. Communications of the ACM, 39(3): 69– 77.