Aims to make sense of IS and to establish that IS is not the same as IT. The text develops a coherent and defensible concept of IS which matches real-world practice.

Soft Systems Methodology was developed in the 1970s. It grew out of the failure of established methods of systems engineering (SE) when faced with messy complex problem situations. SE is concerned with creating systems to meet defined objectives, and it works well in those situations in which there is such general agreement on the objectives to be achieved that the problem can be thought of simply as the selection of efficacious and efficient means to achieve them.

Thirty years ago Peter Checkland set out to test whether the Systems Engineering (SE) approach, highly successful in technical problems, could be used by managers coping with the unfolding complexities of organizational life. The straightforward transfer of SE to the broader situations of management was not possible, but by insisting on a combination of systems thinking strongly linked to real-world practice Checkland and his collaborators developed an alternative approach - Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) - which enables managers of all kinds and at any level to deal with the subtleties and...