MIS 730 Workbook for HW#1 Design poster on Personal Information Systems

Problem Space and Solution Space of your PIS Poster – Your guide to creating the poster

As was mentioned in my lecture, following the process of getting to the finished poster is
the focus of all poster designs. If you focus on the journey to get there, you will not only
enjoy and learn more of the design techniques but will be more consistent in producing
interesting and impactful design results.

Since the design process that we will be following will take a few iterations before you
finalize your posters, here is where you should spend your time and effort in each of the
iterations. First you should focus on understanding the problem space, understanding
particularly the larger system in which the system you are asked to design is to serve.
Unless you know what the larger system is looking to achieve as well as challenges the
larger system is experiencing, you will most likely miss the mark in designing an
effective system to meet the needs of the larger system.

With that said, you will use the Ackoff 3-step process to draw out, from the outside in,
exploring your work/school and personal life, your goals and objectives, the stakeholders,
individuals and or parties that you interact with to meet those goals and objectives. In this
process of exploring and discovering different aspects of your lives, you will most likely
be looking at the things that you do, i.e. the activities that you engage in, the
people/entities that you interact with. By using the activities as the focal point, you will
uncover and learn about the things that you do or not do in achieving your goals and
objectives.

Remember Ackoff “3-step process” and comparison of synthesis vs analysis:

Synthesis Analysis
(From outside in) (From inside out)
Step 1 Looking/Seeing the current Taking the system apart to its
system as a part of a larger smallest part - look for ways
system – Purpose/function and means to divide and
(finding boundaries to the reduce into analyzable parts
larger system)
Step 2 Understand the containing Understand each part taken
system - i.e. the larger separately
system that this system is
contained within
(This is where you are,
exploring your
work/school and personal
life)
Step 3 Disaggregate the Aggregate the understanding of

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 understanding of the whole the parts to the understanding
into understanding of the of the whole
part by identifying its role
or function in the system of
which it is a part
In Summary UNDERSTANDING is You find out HOW things work
derived from explanations – KNOW HOW
– the WHY Knowledge goes from the
Understanding goes from whole down to the parts
the whole up to the larger
wholes

In order to better understand the “containing system” – your school/work and personal
life (step 2), you would have to play out individual examples (set of activities) of
information flow, decision made and interactions, as you carry out your work/school
and personal life. The key is that the focus is on activities you engage in and the
interactions you have with entities and people.

EXERCISE – First, for each key STAKEHOLDERs (including yourself) that will have
different degrees of influence on you achieving your goals and objective, list them out
and try to write next to them their goals and objectives. This is an important exercise as it
would help you to understand their priorities comparing to yours. List your key
stakeholders here (don’t forget yourself) and their goals and objectives as best you can.

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When you look closely at the activities you are doing now, you will learn that you make
certain decisions and or do certain things in a particular sequence or with selected set of
people/entities. That is your choice (whether intentional or not) in getting things done. All
these activities are being performed subjected to how well the people/entities are
interacting with you and any environmental factors that may complicate your ability to
successfully carry out these activities.

At this point of your problem inquiry, you should use scenario narratives to quickly
describe the sequence of things you do, focus on any difficulty/challenges, whether the
activity completed successfully or not, be as specific as possible. Taking note of whether
these activities accomplished your goals and objectives. Use different scenarios to bring
out different aspects of your life that are problematic and or preventing you from
achieving your goals and objectives.

EXERCISE - With that as the introduction, let us consider what happened in the early
morning. Try and capture the things that you do during the day as a sequence of
activities noting along the way, the entities/people you interact with, things that you
accomplished or NOT, the challenges/frustrations in dealing with problems and at
the end of that series of activities, try to connect these activities with your goals and
objectives.
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As you dive into each of these activities, you will take note of constraints and or
challenges in carrying out these activities.

EXERCISE – Jot down the constraints and or challenges that you experience while
carrying out your activities. Come back to this to capture the challenges throughout the
inquiry of your school/work and personal life.

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The scenario narratives (bottom up inquiry) help you focus on the activities (things that
you do and entities/people you interact with) that you engage in day to day to achieve
some objective or simply to get something done. There are two things that you want to
use this set of scenarios to help you construct and understand the problems/challenges
that you are experiencing now.

(1) From the set of activities, in this case the scenario narratives, that you had created,
can you identify a common theme or pattern that you learned occurring
repeatedly? In other words, can you find any trends and or patterns among the
problems/challenges that you learned from the set of scenarios?
You have done the bottom up inquiry, it is now time to take a step back and do the
corresponding topdown inquiry to spot repeated or systemic occurrence of your
system (your work/school and personal life). If you could identify such
pattern/common problem, you might be able to design a contained system (PIS) to
help with your work/school and personal life.

(2) Use the set of scenarios to help you learn about the STRUCTURE and PROCESS
of the containing system – your work/school and personal life. Presumably, in
constructing the set of scenarios, you had captured the most notable/problematic
situations that you are experiencing right now.

The most effective means to show the STRUCTURE and the PROCESS of your
current system is to use illustrations to help highlight the problems and challenges
you encounter in carrying out your work/school and personal life. Use simple
lines, circles and boxes to represent how entities are structured and how they are
related to each other. Lines connecting boxes could be used to show the
relationships with each other or their interactions. You can also use flowcharts and

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 or sequence diagrams to help illustrate the sequence of activities and the decision
points that have to be chosen in order to achieve your goals and objectives. Such
illustrations of PROCESS and STRUCTURE enable you to focus on the entities
and interactions among the entities involved (the STRUCTURE) and the
decisions with associated activities (the PROCESS) to help you identify
opportunity for designing a system to help with those challenges.

As you look closely to the set of scenario narratives that you have captured, here is one
way you can take to learn more about what might be going on…

From the set of scenario narratives, identify the set of actors/entities in your life
(school/work and personal). This can be people, machines, or objects. For sure, one of the
entities is yourself. Other folks will include family members, friends, colleagues, etc.
Then trace or follow the interactions among these entities and note the nature of the
interactions/exchanges. You are looking for frequency of interactions, what get
exchanged, the resources needed to facilitate such interactions, and the mechanisms used
to enable such communications. As you follow these interactions, which I call them
activities/scenarios as at the end of that sequence of interactions, these activities are
initiated with some goals/objectives in mind to accomplish something. I suggest starting
with a day in a life of how you spend the day, weekend noting those interactions. This is
your bottom up exercise of tracing connections/interactions, figuring out the structure of
your current system, the processes that are in place to support your work/school and
personal life. Presumably, at the end of this exercise you will have traced out many series
of interactions, and then begin to categorize them base on commonality/patterns that you
may have identified.

While you are doing this, you will notice problems and challenges – i.e. you are
constantly “fighting fires”, interrupted, doing someone else’s job, etc. Or that you find
yourself spending way too much time in front of the TV or working on your Facebook
page. Whatever that may be that you discovered, they are all important to note. Now that
you have all these activities to account for how you spend the day and week doing, do
they all contribute toward your goals and objectives? Some types/categories of activities
are more important to you than others, you may also find problems with how these
activities have a life of its own, keep repeating and consuming more and more resources.

Whatever you may have gained insights into your life activities, you may be asking
yourself what are the real goals/objectives in your life both short-term and long term, and
whether any of those things that you are doing are helping you achieve those goals. If not,
is that because you are engaging in the wrong set of activities or that the whole system of
activities and the structure that provided support to these activities may be “broken”. You
probably will ask yourself, that you have these goals and objectives to meet (ex. stay
healthy, invest in retirement, more time playing than working, get your Steven MSIS
degree this year, etc.), do you need to change what you are doing? Do you have the right
set of entities in your system, the right process to help achieve them, the resources needed
to help accomplish them, etc.

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EXERCISE – Using all or selected set of scenario narratives, draw or sketch out the
STRUCTURE of your school/work and personal life. Not everything is important. Do the
same for the PROCESS. What are your key decision process that drive the set of
activities you do to accomplish your goals and objectives. Draw them here…

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Such exploration will enable you to map out pattern of interactions among objects/people
as well as the decisions and decision criteria used that change the path and outcome
of these activities. From the set of activities you have played out, over time, you will
build up an abstract way of thinking about such interactions. Once you have the
abstraction (found the common pattern), work back down to the detailed level (the
activities). That is, start from detail interactions, move up to abstraction, and then
back down to the details. (zooming in and out – through abstraction, developing
conceptual model of what is going on) This exercise will enable you to create the
STRUCTURE and the PROCESS of the containing system.

Once you have an abstraction (pattern of interactions and recurring problems

encountered), you will notice different things. But if you start with an abstraction
without having worked up from details, you might miss important things. For
example, if my abstraction of an information system, inherited from past teaching, is
that an information system is a computer, then I will miss many interesting
interactions in my day, and probably settle on buying a PDA, instead of thinking
through what structures, processes and functions I really need to manage my life.

The way to do design generally involves two kinds of thinking – top down vs bottom
up (Synthetical vs Analytical Thinking). You will practice both kinds of inquiry
simultaneously to help you better understand the larger system and to also help you
figure out HOW your current PIS (if you have one) is helping/or not helping you
handle your work/school and personal life.

At this point you would have learned a lot about your work/school and personal life,
activities that you do, what you look to accomplish, problems and challenges. Problem
space of your poster will have illustrations, sketches and many different scenarios to
show just what you have learned. Hence, it should effectively communicate the essence
of your current state of affairs as it relates to work/school and personal life – we call the
space, the Problem Space.

As you begin to look into the solutions to address the problems you had encountered, it is
very important to bear in mind that, there may indeed be things that you would change in
your work/school and personal life – i.e. the larger system. The design assignment calls
for you to design a Personal Information System (the contained system) that would help
you conduct both aspects of your life. When you begin to look at design alternatives for
your PIS, think in terms of the behavior (function) you would like your PIS to have, it
would then lead you to think about the STRUCTURE and PROCESS this system should
have in order to produce these FUNCTIONs. Different choices of structure and process
could be designed to produce the same functions. It is these different combinations of
structure and process that produce different design alternatives.

When you start to sketch and draw out different structures and processes, you are
constructing the solution space of your poster. Solution Space is about the design
alternatives as well as the solution scenarios you will construct to show how any of the
design alternatives works to help you handle both your work/school and personal life.

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Before you leave the Problem Space behind and start looking at different ideas with
respect to addressing the underlying problem that you are experiencing with your
school/work and personal life, you need to identify and define the problem you are trying
to address. If you have done the job of capturing scenario narratives earlier in this
workbook and have come to understand what might be the heart of the problem that
created the problems and challenges that you have come to realized, that would be the
problem you will focus on finding design alternatives.

EXERCISE – Describe the systemic/recurring problem that you had identified in your
bottom up and topdown inquiry that you had determined to be the underlying problem
responsible for the challenges that you had captured in your scenario narratives. In
addition, choose a few key scenario narratives to demonstrate and support your problem
description

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EXERCISE – Show your PROCESS and STRUCTURE illustrations in support of the
problem description above. If the primary problem is the PROCESS, show how decisions
are made and WHY you think is “broken” to have caused the problems. If the primary
problem is the STRUCTURE, show what contributed to the problem in terms of the way
entities are organized, connected or not, how information are exchange or not, etc. If
both then show how both are contributing to the problem.

If you have done all the exercises, you would have created the narratives and the
illustrations for the problem space illustrations for your poster. It is simply a matter of
laying out all the elements on the poster page.

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Creating your Solution Space

You had thus far looked at the scenario narratives collectively in an attempt to spot trends
and patterns, looking for systemic behavior so as to help you identify the underlying
problem that you are looking to address in the solution space. You now should look at the
narratives from the perspective of what these activities are there to accomplish. You may
have done that if you had explored if these set of activities that you do are indeed helping
you meet your goals and objectives.

For example, you may have tasks/activities that have to be done for personal hygiene,
taking care of a child, going to work, etc. They are planned activities where most often
they are scheduled. And then there are activities on the list that were very much event
driven coming at you as the day goes by. Some of these unexpected events may turn into
scheduled tasks/activities that you would carry out in the future. These “to be done
things” as many of us call them “To do list” has items on it that may have different
characteristics in terms of the time, effort and resources that are required to complete
them. They carry different priorities and most of all contribute at different level toward
meeting your personal and professional goals/objectives. No matter how you model your
personal and professional life, this understanding of the demand generated by you and
demands coming at you throughout the day and weeks are key to how your PIS has to be
designed in order to support and enable you to do all those things and meet your goals
and objectives.

Whether the challenges you identified as resolving conflicts, priority, competing for
resources, not getting the info or right info, no access to info, etc, etc, this is the right
time to think about introducing the necessary FUNCTION(s) to help you address the
problem you had identified so that the things that you do will be better aligned with your
short and long term goals and objectives.

EXERCISE – At this point in your inquiry of the problem space and now looking for
possible solution to address the problem, many ideas may already have been in your
mind. Depending how far along these ideas have been brewing in your mind, it is time for
you to describe what the solution idea(s) may be that you are looking to test how
appropriate/effective these ideas may help in addressing the problem. This exercise is
liken to the brainstorming process of generating as many ideas as you can think of as
these ideas become the set of design alternatives that you will explore further. Write them
down as you think of them. If you couldn’t think of anymore, move on. You can always
come back and add more ideas.

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Adding and trimming the idea list is common – part of the process of evaluating
alternatives among available ideas. Developing any of these ideas further sets the path for
developing the functional behavior you want your PIS to have to help you address the
problem you had identified. Remember in our first lecture, we speak of using the
Structure, Process, Function and the environment to model any system (large or small,
simple or complex). SPF/E enable us to form abstract representation of the real system to
help us focus on the important aspects of the systems we are inquiring and subsequently
looking to redesign them.

Most often, our thought process in looking for design solution may start with ideas and
ideas develop into specific functional behavior which then further develop into the
STRUCTURE and PROCESS that co-produce the functional behavior of the system.

EXERCISE – With each design alternatives (possible solutions that you would like to
pursue) that you have listed and described above, illustrate HOW it would work from the
STRUCTURE and PROCESS perspectives to then produce the FUNCTIONal behavior of
this system. Have at least 2 alternatives illustrated here. Use any diagraming techniques
you like.

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What entities you include in your STRUCTURE representation will depends on what is
pertinent to include in order to illustrate how the structure of your solution contributed to
the function of the system. The same applies to the PROCESS representation. What
decision points and tasks should be included in the process will depend on how you see
the process working with the structure to produce the function of the system.

You have used scenario narratives in the problem space to highlight the problems and
challenges that you are experiencing right now. Scenario narratives can also be used to
demonstrate how a design alternative works toward addressing the problem(s) that you
had identified in the problem space.

EXERCISE – One effective way of showing how the new or redesign system work to
address the problem is to use the same set of scenario narratives from the problem space
and show how the outcome would be different when the new PIS is in place. Introducing
a new system or redesigning the existing system is not only to address the problem
identified but to enable new things that, you, as the beneficiary of the PIS, could do that
would not have been possible. If that is the case, then a new set of scenario narratives
needs to be created to show that aspect of the system.

Take the appropriate scenario narratives from the problem space and modify them to
show how the behavior of the larger system (your school/work and personal life) is
different. Additional scenario narratives if appropriate to show new things that you now
could do.

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EXERCISE - What is left to do in the solution space is to indicate which design

alternative is the preferred choice and explain WHY one alternative works better
compare to other alternatives.

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If you have done all the exercises, you would have produced the necessary content to
populate the poster to display both the problem space and the solution space alongside
each other. Turn in this workbook and the poster by the designated due date.

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