Design science: a case study in information systems re-engineering

Abstract

Recently, many organisations have become aware of the limitations of their legacy systems to adapt to new technical requirements. Trends towards e-commerce applications, platform independence, reusability of pre-built components, capacity for reconfiguration and higher reliability have contributed to the need to update current systems. Consequently, legacy systems need to be re-engineered into new component-based systems. This chapter shows the use of the design science approach in information systems re-engineering research. In this study, design science and the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) model are used as the main research frameworks to build and evaluate conceptual models generated by the component-based and traditional approaches in re-engineering a legacy system into a component-based information system. The objective of this evaluation is to verify that the re-engineered component-based model is capable of representing the same business requirements as the legacy system.