Context Engineering: An IS Development Research Agenda

The authors present the Context Engineering (CE) approach to Information Systems Development (ISD) as a framework to organise ideas about previous development experience and to guide future research on specific ISD methods and techniques. The goals of the CE approach are: to achieve an understanding of the ISD as socio-technical phenomena within a cultural and historical envelope; to provide a framework of problems supported on the relation between context and mediators; and to use contextuality as a key to performing emancipatory movements. Fundamental concepts are the notions of context as figure-ground and as autopoietic flux, of human activity as unit of contextual analysis, of the pervasiveness of mediation in human activity, of socio-technical networks as media and the hypothesis of a heterogeneous social engineering. A framework of development problems is presented along with a discussion of general and process related principles for the CE approach.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ECIS
• Authors: Licinio Roque, Ana Almeida, António Dias de Figueiredo
• Keywords: CE Approach, ECIS 2004, Human Activity, Information Technology, Specific Isd Methods