Context Engineering and Modeling Challenges

The authors previously proposed the Context Engineering (CE) approach to Information Systems Development (ISD) as a framework to organise ideas about previous development experience and to guide future research on specific ISD methods and techniques. The goals of the CE approach are: to achieve an understanding of the ISD as socio-technical phenomena within a cultural and historical envelope; to provide a framework of problems supported on the relation between context and mediators; and to use contextuality as a key to performing emancipatory movements. Fundamental concepts are the notions of context as figure-ground and as autopoietic flux, of human activity as unit of contextual analysis, of the pervasiveness of mediation in human activity, of socio-technical networks as media and the hypothesis of a heterogeneous social engineering. A framework of development problems is presented along with a discussion of general and process related principles for the CE approach. A fundamental challenge proposed in this approach is the modeling of context as central influencing aspect of development, and the need to find appropriate instruments – concepts, techniques, representations – for modeling context as part of the ongoing decision making processes in the flow of ISD development activities. Moreover, we need modeling approaches that enable participation and focus on socio-technical relationships as the fabric of reality .