Preface ODISE 201

Information systems (IS) Engineering has progressed considerably over the decades. Numerous advances, such as improved development methodologies, languages that enforce recognised software engineering principles and sophisticated CASE tools, have helped to increase the quality of IS. Regardless of such progress many IS Engineering projects remain unsuccessful (e.g., fail to meet stakeholder requirements, run excessively over budget and far beyond the deadlines initially scheduled). As the literature points out, most of these problems are due to (1) the difficulties of capturing and knowing the business requirements of a living organisational system, (2) realising such requirements in software designs and implementations and (3) maintaining an effective level of synchronicity between the needs of the living system and its information system. The causes underlying such problems are diverse and difficult to identify. Nonetheless it is plausible to assume that at the heart of such IS Engineering problems is the difficulty to conceptualise an organisational system and its real-world problem domain.