Checkland developed Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) to address problem situations from a systems perspective; however, SSM needs to be extended with other methods to find superior solutions that overcome the need for a compromise or trade-off between conflicting or contradictory elements. This thesis extends Checkland’s SSM approach to resolve problems with conflicting or contradictory elements. This work integrates the powerful benefits of TRIZ-based analysis into SSM and provides a means for systemic resolution of business problems with conflicting sub-system elements. Furthermore, this study acknowledges that soft problems can have conflicting relationships among their elements, compares the strengths and weaknesses of SSM and TRIZ in problem structuring, and presents a collaborative SSM-TRIZ approach for problem structuring. Finally, this thesis applies the joint methodology to examine the business problem of customer needs assessment for a certain market segment of INCOSE’s planned Professional Development initiative. Although SSM-TRIZ helps structure problems with opposing requirements, it does not always provide definitive, prescriptive solution implementations for technical and business issues. Hence, hard thinking approaches cannot be discarded in practice after implementing SSM-TRIZ. Text mining was selected for providing a final and definite solution to the problem situation of interest.

Approximately half of the information systems (IS) projects implemented each year are considered failures. These failed projects cost billions of dollars annually. Failures can be due to projects being delivered late, over-budget, abandoned after significant time and resource investment, or failing to achieve desired results. More often than not, the failure of a project is not due to technical issues, but due to social and business-related problems. These issues can include a communication breakdown and lack of participation by project stakeholders; lack of a business case and success criteria for a project; failure to review project status, delays and revisions; and unrealistic schedules. While educators cannot address the issue of project failure in information systems directly, they can target the need to build collaboration skills and sensitivity to project business and social issues in students. The building of these skills and sensitivities can lead to more effective project team members and managers. Conversely, there is little evidence that higher education prepares students to be collaborators. One goal of this research was to determine to what extent students demonstrated group knowledge construction through online discussion of project issues presented in a real-world business scenarios. The Interaction Analysis Model for Examining Social Construction of Knowledge in Computer Conferencing (IAM) was chosen to measure group knowledge construction through discussions in a series of project problem scenarios. A second goal was to determine to what extent the knowledge construction through group discussion increases students' perceived level of awareness of information systems projects' social and business issues. Both goals of this research were realized to some extent. This study demonstrated that by the use of scenarios to expose students to typical social and business causes of failure in information systems projects, awareness of these issues could be enhanced between the pre-test and post-test groups. This study also demonstrated that through participation in discussion groups, individuals can demonstrate significant growth in collaboration skills. Further research should examine a population that has more balance with regard to gender of the participants, and should consider the influence of "guided reflection" provided by instructors.