This book provides fundamental notions of information and its consequences for information service success, business models and processes, and architecture and exploitation. These topics are essential for modern curricula of management, communication science and information systems, and for anyone in search of a foundational understanding of informing.
Information services are economic and organizational activities for informing people. Because informing is changing rapidly under the influence of internet-technologies, this book presents in Chapter 1 fundamental notions of information and knowledge, based on philosopher C.W. Churchman's inquiring systems. This results in the identification of three product-oriented design theory aspects: content, use value and revenue. Chapter 2 describes how one can cope with these aspects by presenting process-oriented design theory. Both design theory insights are applied in chapters on information services challenges, their business concepts and processes, their architectures and exploitation. The final chapter discusses three case studies that integrate the insights from previous chapters, and it discusses some ideas for future research.
This book gives students a coherent start to the topic of information services from a design science perspective, with a balance between technical and managerial aspects. Therefore, this book is useful for modern curricula of management, communication science and information systems. Because of its design science approach, it also explains design science principles. The book also serves professionals and academics in search of a foundational understanding of informing as a science and management practice.
"This book will not be an easy read. Nevertheless, it will be a rewarding one. It is not possible to instruct someone step-by-step how design science works, but it is possible to show them very detailed examples of different types of systems, and let them use these to help learn how to design for themselves. This Fons Wijnhoven has done." - from the Foreword by John Edwards, Aston University, UK
