Computer-Aided Information Systems and Virtual Contexts

In spite of all the efforts deployed in the past fifty years by experts and software vendors to avoid the failure of computer-aided information system projects, the situation has not significantly improved. Up to now an important parameter has not been taken into consideration in the arena of information system design, i.e. the virtual nature of computer-aided information systems. A human making use of computer-aided information systems to collaborate in a business environment is exposed to a multiverse, a real-life universe and a virtual universe where interaction with a set of hidden actors takes place. When a decision-making process is engineered this human relies on a space of pertinent facts extracted from the real-life and virtual universes (s)he is exposed to. In order to conceptualize how this space is operated, the theory of the coordinated management meaning (CMM) is called on. It is made up of schemata resulting from interpretative rules of meaning, deciphering messages and events coming from a real-life universe and from a virtual universe (information systems). Regulative rules of decision for action in the real-life universe are applied to derive data-driven decisions from memorized schemata. These rules refer to modal logic we practice, generally implicitly. Modal logic is a branch of logic which studies and attempts to systematize those logical relations between propositions which hold by virtue of containing modal terms such as "necessarily'', "possibly'' and "contingently''. Modal operators and. are introduced to express the modes with which propositions are true or false. The truth value of. A cannot be inferred from the knowledge of the truth value of A. Modal operators are situation-dependent. Following the 17(th) -century philosopher and logician Leibniz, logicians often call the possible options facing a decision-maker, possible worlds or universes. A fresh approach to the semantics theory of possible worlds was introduced in the 1950s by Kripke and his colleagues. The possible worlds associated with an individual in a certain situation depend on each individual. To date nobody has dared to address this issue clearly in terms of the cognitive requirements of information systems.