There are two major reasons for taking this course: professional awareness and intellectual interest. The professional reason is that you will probably be involved in the design, acquisition or management of information systems during your career, and you should therefore know about good design practices. (This applies to many graduates in fields other than CS, which is why we have extensive interdisciplinary participation.) Many 6144 students have already gained experience of system design on the job, but this may have been patchy. Design does not have to be learned by osmosis, and it is the College’s responsibility to provide courses that help you become more professional designers.
The academic reason for taking 6144 is that information system design practice is a form of complexity management and is therefore a fascinating object of study in its own right. These practical problems have given rise to a set of representational and analytic tools that continue to be the subject of much current research. What, for example, is the relationship between “information” in an information system and the world? How do we assure its accuracy or quality? What are “processes” in organizations and individual activities, and how can we design systems that “support” such processes?
These two strands come together in the details of information systems
modeling techniques: those originally developed for database systems and
the object-oriented techniques for general software that grew out of them.