City Planning Approach for Rebuilding Enterprise Information Systems: The Move towards a More Effective EIS City Planning Approach

An enterprise information systems (EIS) city planning approach was proposed by Namba and Iijima (2004) at PACIS2004. This framework is characterized by the utilization of metaphor to visualize an unseen object (i.e., architecture) and to leverage the concepts and methodologies of city planning from architectural and civil engineering to an EIS. As society grows more mature, effectiveness of city planning itself seems to be increasingly unsuccessful. Correspondingly, some criticize EIS city planning approaches, because they draw upon physical city planning. Especially in the recent business climate, EIS planning seems not doing well. In this paper, we try to understand the reasons why both physical and EIS city planning seem to some to be unsuccessful. It is not attributable to the nature of city planning, but rather to the requirements for city or EIS planning, which have changed as the maturity of the society or the firms’ information systems. We then introduce post-modern city planning. This concept was born of the paradigm change between industrial and post-industrial society. From here, we discuss how postmodern concepts can be realized in the field of EIS. Finally, to illustrate applicability of these new concepts we examine the case of KDDI’s rust-free system.