page_title: Informing science
section_title: Construction of Informing Systems
hierarchical_section_title: Informing science / Informing Systems / Construction of Informing Systems
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustrates informing system levels and parallel systems (discipline and institution) sharing clients
context_page_description: Informing science is a transdiscipline that was established to promote the study of informing processes across a diverse set of academic disciplines, including management information systems, education, business, instructional technology, computer science, communications, psychology, philosophy, library science, information science and many others. Its principal unit of analysis is the informing system, a collection of informers, clients, and channels that has been designed or has evolved to serve a particular informing need. The organization created to advance the informing science transdiscipline is the Informing Science Institute, whose founder, Eli Cohen, proposed the need for the field in his article "Reconceptualizing Information Systems as a Field of the Transdiscipline Informing Science: From Ugly Duckling to Swan". The ISI presently hosts an annual conference, publishes thirteen academic journals, and—through its Informing Science Press—has published dozens of books. Both its journals and books are open access at no cost online, as well as being available for purchase in print form.
context_section_description: Given the field's origins in management information systems (MIS) research, it is not unexpected that early investigations into, and conceptualizations of, the development of informing systems tended to rely heavily on technology-based experienced. Cohen (1999), for example, viewed informing systems as having three levels:
  The informing instance level, where actual informing activities took place.
  The construction level, at which new informing instances were created according to the prevailing design templates.
  The design level, at which new architectures for informing were realized.
  As examples, he proposed (Cohen, 1999, p. 217):
  (1) teaching a course someone else has designed, (2) designing a course that will be taught by others, and (3) creating a new curriculum. A business example is (1) using an existing transaction processing system (TPS), (2) creating a TPS following general design rules, and (3) creating a new type of TPS.
  As illustrated in Figure 4, Gill and Bhattacherjee (2007) further expanded the concept with the example of academic informing systems, which can be described in terms of two related informing systems that share many of the same clients. The disciplinary system represents the research field with which faculty members and departments are aligned. The institutional system represents the activities of the college or university, primarily focused on informing student clients.  
  In subsequent publications (e.g., Gill, 2009a), informing science researchers have also begun to address the issue of how such systems can evolve, as opposed to being a pure product of design. The importance of understanding these informal processes for informing system development—even for IT-based systems—has been underscored by the rapid acceptance of technologies such as social media. There is little question that users have adapted these technologies for their own informing purposes in ways far beyond those anticipated by the original designers of the systems.
caption: Figure 4: Parallel informing systems with multiple levels having overlapping clients (Gill & Bhattacherjes, 2007, p. 23)
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