INTELLECTUALLY MANAGING ORGANIZED COMPLEXITY

The notion of organized complexity, as defined by Gerald Weinberg, seems to be a good indication for the kind of artifacts that professionals in organization and information system science are dealing with. As Edsger Dijkstra already pointed at, our primary task in dealing with those artifacts is to manage intellectually their inherent complexity. Five intellectual techniques will be presented and discussed that provide adequate help in mastering complexity: 1) separation of concerns, 2) use of abstraction, 3) devising proper concepts, 4) verification by instantiation, and 5) validation from ontology. Particular emphasis will be put on the third one, since it appears that many currently popular methods in systems development lack a proper conceptual basis. As a step towards improving this situation, ideas about a new theoretical foundation of information systems are presented and discussed.