Soft Systems Methodology (SSM)

SSM.doc

Soft Systems Methodology (SSM)

Many systems are of the type where very precisely defined information will solve particular problems. DFDs can be useful in such situations to indicate the aims of the organisation and how the information is going to be used.

But many problems in organisations are not of this type, An awareness that an organisation has problems may not be enough to produce an agreed definition of what those problems are. Useful change may have as much to do with altering organisational objectives or culture as with obtaining ever more detailed information requirements. Take John Harvey-Jones’s view of the problems of one of the last remaining British computer companies:

“Roger Foster is convinced that going all out for growth is Apricot’s only hope of survival, and to do this the company must expand overseas. He sees opportunities provided by 1992 and the opening up of European markets as his best hope of achieving this aim. Apricot wants my advice on how to achieve this, but I soon discover that before expansion can even be contemplated, the company’s directors need to take a good hard look at their existing business and where it is heading.” Harvey-Jones, 1990, p74, Troubleshooter.

“I am now hopeful for Apricot. It is making the all-important cultural change from seeing itself as a computer manufacturer, and a failing one at that, to a hopefully highly successful computer software and services company.” (ibid, p98)

Objectives and culture are relatively fuzzy issues which are difficult to define precisely. It has become a common worry in the fields of systems analysis, management science and operational research that there should be some way of drawing some conclusions about them, even if it is difficult to get an agreed consensus about them.

SSM is one of a number of approaches which are used to give some order to these fuzzier problems, or ‘messes’. Its relevance is that it is a technique which has attracted the most academic debate and because attempts have made to link it to the creation of information systems.

Unstructured Problems And Soft Systems.

SSM was developed at Lancaster University during the 1970s by research teams who had originally been trying to develop hard solutions to problem-solving in organisations. Their aim was to model human activities in such a way that problems could be taken from the social sphere and strictly defined in terms of clear, unambiguous objectives. This approach was found to be too mechanical a way of looking at human activities systems. For one thing, it was often found that single, precise problems could not be found: "... the starting point for the systems engineering process is often only a feeling of unease, an awareness that things could be better than they are." (Checkland, 1981, p. 132). Conventional, hard systems approaches depend for their effect of clear objectives being defined so that it is possible to end up with a set of information requirements which can form the basis of a computer program. If the problem owner doesn't appear to have such a clearly bounded problem, then further investigation of the situation is needed. Even then, the Lancaster research teams would uncover no single definition, agreed by all people in an organisation, of its objectives and problems. Rather more common were disagreements which might arise from:

·  misunderstandings, people having different views of goes on in an organisation because they happen to see things differently

·  conflicts of interest, peoples' views being shaped by their desire to retain power for themselves or preserved their jobs and leading them into conflict with others.

Whatever the case, disagreements and multiple viewpoints are common in organisations because organisations are made up of human beings who find it difficult to say exactly what their needs or problems are. Brian Wilson: as an example which is relevant to Information Systems:

In 1983 we were asked to undertake the project for the Prison Department of The Home Office in the UK. The project may be summarised as follows:

·  the concern: do we get value for money from our prison service?

·  The expectation: Information Systems to answer this question on a continual basis.

·  Our problem: costs can be accurately evaluated but value requires an answer to the question: what is prison for?

The prison service consists of a variety of establishments, each operating a regime determined by the particular governor. Discussions with a number of governors and other prison officials indicated a variety of answers to the above question. The "hard liners" believed that inmates were there to settle a debt to society while the more liberal minded saw it as a process of education and rehabilitation. The situation is complicated by the fact that no one individual is ever 100% committed to a single perception. Thus the "punishment"-oriented Governor operates educational processes while the "education"-oriented Governor operates punishment routines. Hence each individual has a spectrum of perceptions related to the situation with which they are concerned. This rather extreme example illustrates the added complexity arising from a consideration of multiple perceptions and it is this feature which makes the situation unique because its effect is determined by the particular group of managers concerned. (Wilson, 1990 p. 91, Systems).

Note the implications:

¨  human activities systems are not like technical or natural systems. They are affected by the perceptions and the values of those involved in them.

¨  Perceptions and values cannot be pinned down to precise, definable formulae.

¨  Each situation is therefore unique. Taking a standard "solution" e.g. an information system for stock control or monitoring performance and applying it in the same way to a number of situations leaves out important features of organisational behaviour. People use the same data in different ways.

¨  Information is not simply a resource with a given meaning. The meaning that we give to data will often vary.

The two fundamental ideas used in developing soft systems models are the transformation process and the world view or Weltanschauung.

a)  The transformation is the purpose of a system: what it exists to do. It is expressed in the form: input transformed into output

something (noun or noun-phrase) becomes the same thing in a transformed state

(another noun or noun-phrase).

The importance of thinking about purpose in human activities systems is precisely that it is not a given, discoverable thing but can be seen in different ways. Checkland gives a number of examples for a library:

a local population to that population better informed

books to dog-eared books

local need for to that need met

information and

entertainment from

books, records, etc

b)  Weltanschauung are assumptions which are to be made if the system whose purpose is to perform the transformation is to be useful or worthwhile. This is most easily expressed in the form of a sentence which makes an affirmation to explain why the transformation is worth doing. For example, with the different views of a prison the transformation could be maladjusted offenders to educated reformed citizens and Weltanschauung would be offenders are likely to respond well to being presented with opportunities to better themselves and perform constructive work. Note that the Weltanschauung statement is questionable: not everyone will agree and there is no need that they should. If there is disagreement, as there is all the time about this type of organisation, the analyst needs to draw up other examples of transformations and Weltanschauungs to reflect the conflicting viewpoints.

The starting point for SSM is that these different, subjective, views affect the way in which an organisation is run. From the point of view of Information Systems this means that the information requirements of people who work in these organisations will vary with view of the organisation. SSM is concerned with trying to model these subjective viewpoints. This might be useful because:

¨  it will assess the information needs of problem owners in the light of their own individual assumptions

¨  all humans have subjective viewpoints. Taking these into account might serve the process of defining more exactly the information that they need to do their jobs.

¨  However if you were taking subjective views into account there is no guarantee that you will be able to define a single set of information needs. The nature of subjective views is that they are "soft". It is often impossible to say for certain that they are right or wrong.

¨  Clarifying a messy problem situation in which members of an organisation may have no clear idea of specific difficulties. This may help to work out structured, bounded problems from messy, unstructured ones.

¨  May help to clarify the direction in which an organisation should heading by investigating its culture in a discursive way. The strategy of an organisation can rarely be determined without some subjective judgments about the future of the environment and the appropriate atmosphere within which its employees work.

¨  Help learn about the situation of the organisation. Ultimately this is what Checkland regards as success. The use of SSM is not necessarily about producing a set solution which expert analysts impose on uncommitted users. Its intention is to produce debate among the participants in a situation so that they work out for themselves what changes are necessary and possible. SSM models are intended to aid that learning process.

The difference between hard and soft systems thinking is in their treatment of differences of opinion. A hard systems view will see the organisation as having certain interests which must be satisfied if it is to survive. The IS specialist is therefore a designer of the means of satisfying information requirements, whether by direction or consultation. Thus, the idea of systems as transforming input to output is implicit in SSADM but world views do not have a place; they are considered political and therefore outside the remit of the analyst. A soft systems analyst will tend to be more of a facilitator than a designer, encouraging people to explore their own and other peoples' views in order to generate ideas about change. Under these circumstances it becomes extremely relevant to model different views of a situation rather than looking for a single correct version.

Hypothetical example:

The London Ambulance Service lost several millions on a computerised routing system which was intended to provide a faster response to emergency calls. The project took place against a background of horrendous industrial relations, problems which do not seem to have been taken into consideration during the project. Soft systems analysts might have produced a number of systems definitions:

¨  a system to transform a slower to a faster response service (T) on the assumption that greater speed is necessary and that automation will provide it (W).

¨  a system to transform the structure of command to one in which decisions are made by receivers of emergency calls, based on the assumptions that new technology requires individuals to work more responsibly.

Basic Principles:

SSM can be considered a set of activities linked together in a rough sequence:

·  problem situation considered problematic

·  problem situation expressed

·  root definitions of relevant purposeful activity systems

·  conceptual models of the systems named in the root definitions

·  comparison of models and real world

·  changes: systematically desirable, culturally feasible

·  action to improve the problem situation

It is not important that all activities are done in order. It is important to distinguish between analysis of the real world and the use of ideas within the world of systems thinking: they have different purposes; there is a constant interaction between the two (a combination of cultural stream and logic-based stream). There is a constant to and fro between the real world of human activities, statements, feelings and perceptions and systems thinking about the real world. Systems thinking means thinking of organisations as if they were systems to achieve a particular purpose. The results are then compared with the organisation in the real world (from creative use of real world evidence).

Techniques for investigating the problem situation

It is an important principle of SSM that analysts or observers should try not impose their own definitions of the nature of problems on people within a particular situation. In messy situations especially, a number of issues, human or technical, will affect each other in ways which will be most readily appreciated by those who are directly involved. An important first step for an analyst is therefore to learn as much as possible about what is going on in an organisation with no preconceptions about how relevant the findings are to producing change. A number of modelling techniques have been developed to express this process:

·  Rich picture: has no formal conventions unlike a context diagram. There is no restriction of subject-matter. The purpose of the model is to give an overall impression of the state of an organisation and its situation, so anything may be illustrated, whether formal structures or informal communications and attitudes. The principle is that many issues will affect definitions of problems, so a wide-ranging pictorial illustration will convey the variety of the issues more strongly that a textual description.