WITS

Rigor and Relevance—A Design-Science Story about BPMN

For many years, I have had an on-again, off-again relationship with design science. I read the first edition of Herbert Simon’s book The Sciences of the Artificial shortly after it was published, and I was greatly attracted to the notion of a science of design that Simon proposed. Indeed, for a number of years, I used his book as required reading in an information systems course I taught. I have always felt that viewing information systems through the lens of designing an artifact lies at the foundation of the information systems field. Simon’s book was one of the few that provided a scholarly foundation to support such a perspective. I continue to struggle, however, to come to a deep understanding of what constitutes high-quality design-science research…

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