AUTHOR
Magnusson, Henrik; Videman, Juha

DATE
2000-10-06

DEPARTMENT
Business Administration and Social Sciences / Informatics and Systems Sciences

SUMMARY
In these times of fast changes in the environment, a good view of your organisation is becoming more and more important. This view is created by business modelling. The biggest problem with business models, as we see it, is that the methods known to us, mainly aims at the harder parts of an organisation. The softer parts are not considered. With the hard parts we address the traditional views where the human aspects are not considered. The softer parts are where the human parts considered.

Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is a methodology where the softer parts are considered, as we see it, in a good way. We will mainly use the method part of the methodology, because a methodology and a method are, according to us, impossible to merge. TRIAD, on the other hand, is a method that concentrates on the harder parts of a system. To be able to compare and enrich each other, we have used meta-modelling. It is a tool for comparing methods and methodologies. We make a method alliance, i. e. a merger of two methods. This will be done by using the three models in meta modelling, meta intention-model, meta concepts-model and meta model for ways of working.

In analysis a few parts that could complement each other were found. Some parts were conflicting put we did not found conflicting parts that could prevent a merger according to method alliance. This has resulted in three propositions how SSM can enrich TRIAD.

The first of these propositions is to get a rich picture, analysis 1,2,3 from SSM and the four perspectives from TRIAD used complementary. The second proposition is to bring weltanschauung from SSM to the different relationships between the different objects in a model. Finally the third proposition is to look at the different parts and too see if there are conflicts between the parts when looking if the changes are systemically desirable and culturally feasible.

ISSN 1404-5508 / ISRN LTU-SHU-EX--00/225--SE / NR 2000:225