With the growing presence of IT and the WWW, more and more organizations
are attempting to gain the benefits of computers and software to improve
their efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability. The process of
computerizing an organization requires not only the introduction of
computers and software, but also training the employees of the organization
to be effective users of the computers and software. This change is called
organizational transformation (OT). OT is thought to be a systematic
process. However, enough failed OT efforts have demonstrated that the main
difficulties are behavioral, political, and social. That is, the would-be
users do not always cooperate. They resent the changes in their jobs, the
fear the loss of their jobs, etc. They sometimes even actively sabatoge the
OT effort.

<p>
Traditional approaches to requirements elicitation stress systematic
and rational analysis and representation of organizational context and
system requirements. This joint work with Isabel Ramos and Joao Carvalho at
Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestao de Viana do Castelo, Portugal 
attempts to understand why these traditional approaches do not guarantee a
successful OT. The work argues that (1) for an organization, a
software system implements a shared vision of a future work reality and
that (2) understanding the emotions, feelings, values, beliefs, and
interests that drive organizational human action is needed in order to
invent the requirements of such a software system. The work exposes
some myths about how organizations transform themselves through the
adoption of Information and Communication Technology; describes the
concepts of emotion, feeling, value, and belief; and presents some
constructionist guidelines for the process of eliciting requirements
for a software system that helps an organization to fundamentally
change its work patterns.
<p>
Ramos, I., Berry, D.M., and Carvalho, J.A., ``The Role of Emotion,
Values,
and Beliefs in the Construction of Innovative Work Realities,''
D. Bustard, W. Liu, and R. Sterritt (eds.), <cite>Soft-Ware 2002: Computing in
an Imperfect World</cite>, LNCS 2311, Springer 2002, pp. 300--314,
<cite>Proceedings of First International Conference,
Soft-Ware 2002</cite>, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 8--10 April 2002
<a
href="FTP_SITE/reprints.journals.conferences/ramos.berry.carvalho.SOFT-WARE.pdf">
PDF preprint
</a>

<p>
Additional studies are needed to see if past OT failures can be understood
as failure to deal with emotions, values, and beliefs at RE time.
For example, we are reexamining the failure of the deployment of the
<a href="http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/A.Finkelstein/las.html">
London Ambulance Service Computer Aided Despatch System </a>
in this light.