A Dance of Creation and Dissemination: Changing Perspectives on Business System Design and Language within and across Communities of Practice

Evolutionary improvements in day-to-day practice are often paralleled by investments in knowledge creation activities that may result in revolutionary improvements. This is the motivation of a consulting and services organization that funds a research organization.

In this position paper, we describe and reflect on our involvement, as researchers, in developing innovations in specifying and modeling businesses. These developments have challenged the long-held distinction between strategic business design, and information systems design. Changing the categorization of the "system to be designed" impacts practices in both the designs of the social systems of enterprises, and the information systems that support them. This reflection recounts our participation in the creation and ongoing dissemination of a revolutionary perspective on business called Sense-and-Respond.

In this first attempt to reflect on this process, we find ourselves comparing our experiences to Kuhn's observations on scientific revolutions [9], which are widely known in the "hard" sciences. Business modeling can be seen both from the objective perspective of the information system artifact that is created, and the subjective perspectives of the individuals creating it. We reflect on the difficulties of achieving conceptual revolutions in the joint practices of management consulting and information technology services.