Information Intensive Modeling

The interaction of formal information systems and organizational decision models will be examined in this article. It is conjectured that decision models and processes not only determine the information requirements, but that they are influenced by the organizational information systems that are designed to support them. T his type of circular relationship between the decision models and the information systems undermines the success of requirements analysis which traditionally views information systems as supporting structures for the decision models, and ignores their counter effect on the decision models. Four different examples are presented to demonstrate the effect of information systems on organizational decision models. The examples range form algorithmic to highly unstructured and speculative, but they all suggest that information-intensive models are qualitatively different from their information-poor counterparts.