Investment in information technology (or IT) does not necessarily bring improvement in business performance. One important cause of this is the divorce between the design of the IT systems and business organisations. An approach of organisational semiotics, based on the understanding of organisations as systems of social norms emphasises the central role of the people, their responsibility and the organisation in the analysis and design of IT applications. Business organisations are analysed as systems of meanings, intentional communication and interpretation that create knowledge, which sooner or later leads to action. Effective methods for organisational analysis and systems design (MEASUR) have been developed on the basis of this theory. However, to make these methods ready for practical, industrial use, they need further work, especially the creation of supporting aids and tools. The recently established research project, SEDITA, addresses these issues and invites collaboration both within business and research institutions. Keyword: Organisation, semiotics, information systems, requirements engineering, systems analysis and design, MEASUR, methodology, semantics, ontology, pragmatics, knowledge. “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them” Sir Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge, p.81

An organizational role is defined as a set of functions together with a set of policies (deontic statements). Several roles can be played by the same human or artificial agent. It is also possible that a set of agents is designated to play a given role. In modern organizations it is common to find most agents performing several different simultaneous roles. This may cause ethical and deontic conflicts when the same agent must play conflicting roles. In such cases the agent must use some criterion to solve the internal conflict. In the following we will propose a methodology for approaching this kind of problems, maintaining the essential agents’ autonomy. Organizational agents, humans or machines, must be modeled using a social model. This view is envisioned by the computational semiotics community, where six layers are defined (Stamper 1973) including two broad areas: the information technology platform, which consists of three layers (physical world, empirics and syntax) and the human i formation functions, which consists also of three layers (semantics, pragmatics and social world). The semantic analysis of business environments can be graphically depicted as an ontology chart, including all agents, roles, resources and their ontological dependencies. An example is shown in figure 1. Additionally to the conceptual knowledge, expressed graphically in the ontology chart, the ontology must also specify behavioral normative knowledge using norms. Norms will be formally defined below, but informally they are seen as social rules that an agent ought to follow. When a clear organizational ontology is not available, where all roles are described and all normative aspects such as authority and power relationships are clear, it might not be possible to understand and predict the agents’ behavior.

One of the most difficult, yet crucial, tasks in any project of reengineering or extension of a legacy system is to understand the system and to recover the original requirements. To develop an effective method of requirements recovery for legacy information systems, the AMBOLS project proposes a semiotic framework. In complement to other conventional methods of systems engineering, two semiotic methods, Semantic Analysis and Norm Analysis, have been adopted for elicitation, derivation and representation of users' requirements. The AMBOLS method recovers the requirements by analysing the normative behaviour of the legacy system in its context, and observing and modelling the interactions of its users.