Niehaves et al. Conceptual Modeling - An Epistemological Foundation Conceptual Modeling - An Epistemological Foundation Björn Niehaves University of Münster, Germany isbjni@wi.uni-muenster.de Michael Ribbert University of Münster, Germany ismiri@wi.uni-muenster.de Alexander Dreiling Queensland University of Technology, Australia a.dreiling@qut.edu.au Roland Holten University of Frankfurt, Germany holten@wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de ABSTRACT The success of contemporary organizations depends on their ability to make appropriate decisions. Making appropriate decisions is inevitably bound to the availability and provision of relevant information. Information systems should be able to provide information in an efficient way. Thus, within information systems development a detailed analysis of information supply and information demands has to prevail. Based on Syperski’s information set and subset-model we will give an epistemological foundation of information modeling in general and show, why conceptual modeling in particular is capable of specifying effective and efficient information systems. Furthermore, we derive conceptual modeling requirements based on our findings. A short example illustrates the usefulness of a conceptual data modeling technique for the specification of information systems. Keywords Conceptual Modeling, Information Requirements Engineering, Language Communities, Epistemology INTRODUCTION An ongoing discussion on the business value of IT (Hitt and Brynjolfsson, 1996; Im, Dow and Grover, 2001; Mukhopadhyay, Kekre and Kalathur, 1995; Subramani and Walden, 2001; Tam, 1998), the role of IT in creating competitive advantage (Johnston and Vitale, 1988), and the perception that IT has changed from a simple administrative support tool to the vital backbone of an organization (Henderson and Venkatraman, 1999; Li and Chen, 2001; Venkatraman, 1994) clearly indicate that the role and impact of IT in contemporary organizations has changed significantly. In order to cope with the increased pressure on IT (Mukhopadhyay et al., 1995) as a result of these developments, the implementation of business solutions needs, more than ever to be effective, that is to meet business requirements exactly. Moreover, it needs to be increasingly efficient, requiring shorter development cycles, increased quality, and lower development costs. From an IS perspective, a broad variety of methods, architectures, and solutions aim at supporting the information systems development process (Avison and Fitzgerald, 1995; Galliers and Swan, 2000; Hirschheim, Klein and Lyytinen, 1995). Nevertheless, many information systems development projects fail for several reasons (Standish Group International, 2001; Keil, 1995). One of the reasons of the failure of IT projects is a miscommunication between business and IT personnel. Business personnel, usually, are not able to explicitly give their information requirements to IT personnel in a way that can be technically used to implement or configure a system such as a data model or a process model. IT personnel, on the other hand, usually, do not have a business background detailed enough to provide business personnel with appropriate IT solutions independently. A shared domain knowledge between business and IT executives, positively influences the alignment of business and IT objectives and thus enhances the quality of IT solutions (Reich and Benbasat, 2000). Transferable languages or a shared language to enable communication between business and IT personnel will lead to shared domain knowledge because interdisciplinary organizational members have a means to communicate. Conceptual modeling is a commonly accepted approach to overcome communication problems (Wand and Weber, 2002). To visualize and conceptualize the communication problem between business and IT, we will introduce in the next section a model that was originally developed by Szyperski (Szyperski, 1980). The model identifies three communities involved in Proceedings of the Tenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, New York, New York, August 2004 4232