This view has recently been expressed forcefully by Crowe, et. In the above quotation, the debt to Checkland's work is clearly apparent. The separation of subject and object is both real and illusory. True, because in the cognitive realm it serves to express the real separation, the dichotomy of the human condition, a coercive development. False, because the resulting separation must not be hypostatised, not magically transformed into an invariant.
New systems have to be justified by the benefits that they deliver.
In fact, the systems analyst should be seen not purely as some sort of enquiring transcendental subject, but as an economically-constituted actuality. At the very least, the economic activities which generate systems development projects have a key determining role on the analysts' foci of attention in the project, and systems analysts do not generate knowledge purely in the interest of advancing science. However, despite economic pressures to conform to a certain view of the organisations in which we are immersed, we are all sometimes able to see problems with the actually existing set of arrangements. This implies that neither a hard or soft approach to IS development will be adequate if used in isolation. References available upon request from the author.