Designing information systems for nursing practice: data base and knowledge base requirements of different organizational technologies.

One of the major causes of failure of information system design is the failure of developers to take into account the organizational environment, thereby leading to an unusable system. The first step in designing an effective system is to describe the user's view of the system, a view that incorporates how the system will help users to manage information in their particular organizational environment. For nurses involved in designing a nursing information system, a useful way of considering the organizational environment is provided by Perrow. The organizational technologies described by Perrow can be viewed as different models of nursing practice, each with particular requirements for a knowledge base and a data base. Nurses can identify the model that most closely corresponds to actual or desired nursing practice in their agencies and use the model's associated knowledge base and data base requirements as a guide to specifying the information system to be developed.