Information systems

When, in a civilized society, a necessary or opportune mission exceeds the capabilities of an individual, a company is created to organize the work of several people (we'll use the term "company" to designate an institution, whether a business or a public service).

Just as every company produces and uses words and numbers, information systems are as old as civilization itself.

However, the term "information system" (IS) didn't appear until the late 1960s (Mélèse . Mélèse was influenced by Simon ), when companies began to rely on the programmable logic controller known as the "computer" to store, process and use data.

This expression refers to an alliance between the automaton and the organization of human action, between the automaton and the human brain. This alliance must obey the practical demands of rationality, to which the computer platform adds its own requirements.

IS engineering therefore requires more explicit methods and approaches than companies were able to make do with before computerization. To meet the demands of action, it relies on a number of techniques, all equally necessary and stacked in four layers above the IT platform: language, action, control, strategy.

Semantic engineering defines the company's language with data administration and repositories; process engineering structures productive action with procedural thinking and modeling; control engineering clarifies management with indicators and dashboards; business engineering concretizes the company's strategic orientation and positioning.

IS engineering is therefore not the same as IT engineering, which, along with software architecture and resource sizing, provides the platform for enterprise computerization: IT and computerization are in a relationship analogous to that between shipbuilding and navigation.

The combination of automaton and brain, now ubiquitous thanks to the network, has transformed our relationship to space and time, as well as our way of thinking and acting: it has thus given rise to as many new dangers as new opportunities. But computerization has moved too fast for the know-how and savoir-vivre it demands of IT specialists, managers and users to have matured: this explains why, as Standish Group surveys show, IT projects still have a failure rate...