Extensions to Churchmanian Inquiring Systems in Order to Support Learning in Organisations and Group Support Environments

This paper examines the support for Churchmanian Inquiring Systems offered by a group of 20 century philosophers. Whilst being, in itself, an analysis, synthesis and consolidation of abstract theory, it acts as support for the design of information systems. This is expected to be relevant for those theories of information systems development which relate to organisational learning (Boland, Tenkasi and Te’eni, 2001), or to system design for technology supported group work (Rana, Turoff and Czech, 1996). This paper follows Courtney Croasdell and Paradice (1998) in the use of the term inquiring organisations. They derive their concept by analogy with Senge’s (1990) concept that organisations can only survive if they have a competitive edge. Further, this competitive edge cannot be maintained unless the organisation, as a whole, is capable of learning from its experience. The original selection of supporters of specific inquiring systems reflect the development of philosophy in Europe between the 17 and 18 centuries, together with E.A. Singer in America. This selection was adequate for the design of data processing systems, but does not “facilitate dialogues among the organisation’s community of inquirers” (Boland et al, 1994:464). Consequently, Scheele (1975) suggests that an inquiring system be recognised which is based on the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. They suggest that using Merleau-Ponty as a label for such an inquiring system would be a reasonable compromise. The argument that the ideas of phenomenology will be useful is developed Haynes (2000). He advocates the use of Heidegger and his phenomenology to support “Ethical Enlightenment” in system design. Further, Boland et al. (1994) require hermeneutics to support distributed cognition, for which they use the work of Gadamer. This is significant because Vance (1997) points out that the school of thought propagated by Gadamer, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault is not the one usually followed. Instead Vance argues that the school of Dilthy is the one most often considered. The aim of this paper is to clarify this tangle of ideas. Bennetts P D C & Wood-Harper T Extensions to Inquiring Systems for New Environments 7 Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems, 10-13 July 2003, Adelaide, South Australia Page 1664