Philosophical Framework for Business System Modeling

As an infrastructure, the information system should be based on a comprehensive understanding of the business system that it is intended to support. Therefore, one of the essential principles of information systems development methodologies is the Principle of Modeling. This principle, expressing that the information system is always a model of the Real World business system, persists despite the abrupt development of new and popular approaches and methods that often, unfortunately, cannot be considered an evolutionary step forward. Current ideas like the digital transformation or business-IT alignment that dismantle the border between a business system and its information system make the importance of this principle even stronger. In the paper, the comprehensive four-dimensional information model of the business system is defined based on the MMABP Philosophical Framework for Business System Modeling. The two basic phenomena that form the business system and two points of view on the business system are explained together with their manifestation in the modeling methods in informatics. Finally, we also shortly discuss emerging challenges for these methods following the framework.