Stimulating power games as a part of systems development
研究了一种名为“劳动游戏”的信息系统开发方法，通过实地实验证明该方法能将讨论焦点从技术转向员工能力和权力结构调整，适合早期系统开发阶段使用。
The biggest problems of information system development (ISD) are not in the construction of technical artefacts. The real challenges to development are the social and political aspects of change. Imagining new organizational structures is difficult because knowledge about existing structures is often objectified. Furthermore, the power structures of organizations make such imagination more difficult or even forbidden. This paper describes a study in which a prototype of an information systems (IS) development method, called the Labour Game, was evaluated in field experiments. The paper describes the method and demonstrates how it succeeded in shifting the focus of discussions from technical development to issues which typically increased the competence of employees and modified the power structures of the work processes. The paper advocates the use of ‘soft’ methods, which help users and managers to talk about the social structures of work and consequently about different IS requirements in the early phases of systems development.