Questioning two-role models or who bakes the pizza?
Mikael Lind, Göran Goldkuhl · 2002
When developing information systems there is a need for business modelling in order to highlight essentials of businesses. Within the Language-Action community there are a number of approaches for business modelling. These approaches put focus upon interaction between two roles in order to emphasise agreements about actions to be performed and actions which have been performed. It has however been identified by several scholars that such two-role thinking has its limitations. Weigand & De Moor are such critics who claim that there is a need to both express horizontal co-ordination (customer relations) and vertical co-ordination (agency relations). They have therefore developed a multi-role model. Their model seems however to be incomplete. The purpose of this paper is to present an alternative multi-role model, based upon a critical analysis of Weigand’s & De Moor’s multi-role model. Through our multi-role model we acknowledge different kinds of assignments (role assignment, internal product assignment and external product assignment) and different roles taking part for establishing and fulfilling such assignments. These different kinds of assignments are needed for understanding internal and external horizontal co-ordination as well as vert ical co-ordination. As an aid in our analysis we use a pizza-shop case from Weigand & De Moor.