Mechanisms for communication between business and IT experts

The paper shows how a system of important concepts and approaches proposed by system thinkers (such as philosophers, mathematicians, engineers, and computing scientists) and described in international (ISO) standards has been used to understand and specify various kinds of business and IT systems, and to base IT work on a solid foundation that has been used for communicating with non-IT experts, thus establishing successful and meaningful interactions between business and IT experts and organizations. These common elegant concepts — such as abstraction, system, structure, relationship, composition, pattern, name in context, etc. — come from exact philosophy and mathematics. They have been stable for centuries, and have been successfully used in theory, in industrial practice (including international standards), and in teaching of business and IT modeling. The essential stable semantics of these fundamental concepts and of systems specified using them ought to be clearly separated from the accidental (often IT-industry-imposed excessively complex and rapidly changing) details. The paper includes two case studies of applying the approach – with demonstrable success – in a large financial institution and in a leading publishing company.