Organizational Semiotics Evolving a Science of Information Systems

Organizational Semiotics regards organizations as the real information systems in which technologies have an essential role to play. It develops this perspective using the established discipline of semiotics, the theory of signs. A sign is anything that stands for something else within a certain community. This fundamental notion supports a unified treatment of human and technical aspects of information systems.Organizational Semiotics: Evolving a Science of Information Systems covers such issues as: -Fundamental concepts such as 'information', 'data', 'message', 'communication', 'knowledge', 'organization', 'system' and so on; -Properties of signs vital to organizational functioning, such as their meanings, the intentions they express and the valuable social consequences they produce; -'Architecture' of organizations when they are viewed as information systems, based on their semiotics features; -Understanding language in organizational contexts, for example, the limitations on the language used to conduct business affairs; -The empirical study of communications for requirements elicitation; -Applying semiotic categories (e.g. physical, empiric, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, social) to various problems; -Organizational knowledge representation; -Business process re-engineering methods and the design of e-commerce systems.This volume comprises the proceedings of the Working Conference on Organizational Semiotics: Evolving a Science of Information Systems, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in July 2001. This Working Conference, the initiative of IFIP Working Group 8.1, was preceded by related workshops over a period of six years; the proceedings of the 1999 and 2000 meetings were published by Kluwer Academic Publishers.Organizational Semiotics: Evolving a Science of Information Systems will be of prime interest to all those working in information systems, especially researchers, lecturers, and students, as well as industrial practitioners.