1. Introduction: making sense of business

This chapter introduces the idea that design thinking is important to both making sense of and resolving many contemporary problems of organisation, within the private, public and voluntary sectors. The chapter begins by considering the difficulties of breaking with conventional ways of thinking and locates business analysis and business design within what has become known as design science. It then explains the nature of design science and how it differs from natural and social science. To help apply design science as it is applicable to business the chapter also examines the nature of design theory and design artefacts.

To help centre the notion of design this chapter examines the work of some great designers focusing on an array of different design artefacts. It then ponders on the nature of design as an activity and considers what it means to design business. This leads to a consideration of a range of popular techniques used to both set problems and solve problems. This enables us to set the context for the toolkit of design techniques described in this book. We place our toolkit against a lifecycle model of analysis and design and explain how these techniques relate to other techniques available in the armoury of the business designer.

In this chapter we examine the nature of organisation. We consider first two alternative viewpoints on organisation which we refer to as the institutional and action views. This enables us to demonstrate how these competing viewpoints can be unified through the systems concept of emergence. Within this book organisation is best viewed as a complex system and we focus on specific facets of organisation known as socio-technical systems. We propose that such systems are made up of patterns of action which regenerate institutional structure but are always catalysts for change. This leads us to consider the essential elements of patterns of organisation: actors, action, location and sequence. We define the concept of role in terms of actors taking conventional action and make the case for considering not only technologies such as IT systems as actors but also data structures.

Business analysis and design work is normally organised in terms of projects. A project is any concerted and systematic effort to achieve a set of objectives. All projects consist of teams of people engaged in the achievement of explicit objectives, usually with a set timescale. As such a business design project can be considered an activity system. A team of business actors is normally appointed to undertake such projects. These actors not only communicate amongst themselves they also communicate with other actors in the process of business investigation. Hence, any project work relies upon an associated information system. Also, in undertaking business analysis work project members document results as models - this comprises the data system
About the Author:

Paul Beynon-Davies is Professor Emeritus at the Cardiff Business School. Before taking up an academic post, Professor Beynon-Davies worked for several years in the informatics industry in the UK both in the public and private sectors. He has published 13 books and over eighty peer-reviewed academic papers, many in leading journals such as the Information Systems Journal, the European Journal of Information Systems and the Journal of the Association for Information Systems.