Construction of Situational Information Systems Management Methods

Situational method engineering (SME) is an established approach to create situated methods which allows the systematic construction of software artifacts while considering specific project context and goals. The author’s motivation is to investigate whether and how SME can be applied to Information Systems management (ISM), i.e., if SME concepts can be extended in order to create situated ISM methods whose application allows the systematic design of certain ISM tasks while considering context and goals. Their contribution is the proposal of a generic approach that includes such extensions and can be regarded as a SME method for ISM. For the exemplary domain of Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM), the author illustrates and demonstrate the proposed approach by (a) analyzing existing EAM solutions to discover design factors and identify solution clusters, (b) specifying to-be solution clusters and implied transition paths, and (c) deriving activity modules whose composition supports relevant transition paths and constitutes situated, context and goal specific ISM methods. For the EAM example, They document the identification of (a) eight design factors and three as-is solution clusters, the specification of (b) three to-be solution clusters and four transition paths, and the derivation of (c) five method modules that allow to be composed into four situated EAM methods.