Monday, June 07, 2010

On difficulties of forming opinions on what you don't know that you don't know - in Information Systems Engineering

Prof. Dr. Ing. Arne Sølvberg - Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway.

 

Information systems engineering is increasingly dealing with non-routine problem solving. Information support systems must be built to adapt to continuous changes in the ways of the supported organizations. Problem solving organizations learn as they operate. As more knowledge is gained about a particular task the initial approach to the task may change. New subproblems are identified and new needs for information support will surface. This is in contrast to the more common routine processing of predefined tasks and the associated workflow design. Straightforward requirements engineering is not longer sufficient. The talk will discuss the phenomenon of uncovering the unknown in an information systems engineering setting.

 

Presenter bio

Arne Sølvberg is Professor of Computer Science at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, since 1974. He received a M.Sc. degree in Engineering Physics in 1963, and a dr.ing. degree in Computer Science in 1971, both from The Norwegian Institute of Technology (now incorporated in NTNU - The Norwegian University of Science and Technology). He was Dean of NTNU’s Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering in 2002-09. His main research interests are in information systems engineering. He has been a Visiting Scientist with IBM San Jose Research Labs, The University of Florida, The Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, The University of California at Santa Barbara, at Los Angeles, and at Berkeley. He has been member of the VLDB Endowment, chaired IFIP WG8.1 for information systems design. He is co-founder of the CAiSE conference series.