Towards a Method Family Supporting Information Services Co-Creation in the Transdisciplinary Context

Increasing popularity of the notion of service in the enterprise business and information systems development facilitates the creation of new types of inter-organizational and multidisciplinary collaboration and value co-creation. Simple exchange of services between organizations evolves into the co-creation of transdisciplinary services shared by all involved partners. In this paper we introduce the notion of transdisciplinarity and discuss how to support information services co-creation in this new context. For this purpose, we identify and explore four main principles (communication, collaboration, co-innovation, and agility) to be implemented in the transdisciplinary information services co-creation – the challenges that their implementation entails and the existing approaches and techniques that support their implementation. Finally, we propose a method family approach as a means to create new methods including a large variability of techniques and providing configuration mechanisms. In particular, we demonstrate how to create a method family providing a flexible and agile process model based on the transdisciplinarity principles and allowing to combine techniques and approaches from different disciplines in order to support collaborative creativity, modeling and development of transdisciplinary services.