The Relevance of Systems Methodologies in the Development of Organizational Systems

Abstract

The relationship between systems development and systems methodologies is discussed in this paper. As the measure of system development on the macro level, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is assumed to be the consequence of systems Research and Development (RD), which is estimated indirectly by the number of published articles in the last 40 years. It was supposed that profit and governmental organizations are systems comprised of Production, Management and Information Systems (IS), and that their quality performance is related with its income generation, which in the future would impact the overall GDP of a country. Under such view, we also assume that such organizational processes are qualitatively improved by the application of knowledge generated by research publications, and in this study, we research for the specific case of the Systems Approach (SA), Systems Engineering (SE), Operational Research (OR), Information Systems Development (ISD) and Simulation, as the research topics for coping with organizational improvement. We looked for the articles containing the afore-mentioned variables as topic keywords, which indicate sufficient correlations with GDP and carrying information on sustainable development. We found a positive trend in the evolution of research methodologies, such as SE, ISD and OR, towards a Systems Approach and Simulation as a holistic methodology. As a result, we have proved the dynamic hypothesis of a high correlation between GDP of Top 10 + Slovenia and RD expressed by the above-mentioned variables.