Cultures in Information Systems Development

Abstract

Modelling is an essential part of information systems development. Models are used for communication between interest groups and inside development teams. Models are also used for transferring baseline artefacts between development phases. Models are mainly developed by humans, which represent certain cultures - national, enterprise, professional, team, project etc. Because of that we claim that models, as well as many other information systems related artefacts are culture dependent. The models are born in certain context and these must be also interpreted by taking the original context into account. In our earlier studies we have analysed the effect of culture in information systems development: culture related aspects in general level, in information search and interaction and in web information systems. We focus now on modelling. Because of that we shortly answer to the question “How cultures differ from each other”. This reviews and synthesis generally accepted frameworks for cultural analysis. In addition we shortly open the results of our earlier studies. Because modelling is a human activity, as well as information systems are used by humans, we integrate the use context into information systems development. The findings of culture analysis are transferred to modelling practices via our framework that defines model as an instrument transferring elements of its development context to the models – we discuss the roles of normal models, deep models and modelling matrix. Finally we will concentrate on the problems of cross-cultural modelling using selected national cultures as an example.