Peter Checkland
Peter Checkland was born in 1930 in Birmingham. He was educated at George Dixon’s Grammar School and St John’s College Oxford, from where he graduated with 1st class honours in chemistry in 1954. Following a 15-year successful research career at ICI Fibres he joined Lancaster’s pioneering Department of Systems Engineering in 1969 as Professor of Systems.
At Lancaster, for the next 30 years with colleagues and Masters students, he led a programme of action research, much of it organised through the UK’s first university consultancy company, ISCOL. From this continuous cycle of intervention in ill-structured management problems and learning from the results, emerged a fully developed SSM. Critical to this development was Peter’s recognition that purposeful human activity can be modeled systemically. He called it Soft Systems Methodology (SSM).
Rather than SSM models attempting to map the real world – impossible because there are multiple candidates for what counts as the real world in complex situations – the models are devices for learning about the real world. In short, SSM becomes a process of inquiry, a learning system. These ideas were used extensively in the MSc in Systems, and later in the MSc in Information Management. In the field of information management Peter has been concerned with IS and its relationship to IT, and in particular the contribution that systems ideas, or the process of thinking systemically, can make to the modeling and understanding of this relationship.
Peter’s work is published in many leading journals and in four key books, including the seminal Systems Thinking, Systems Practice now in its 25th year of print, and Information, Systems and Information Systems: making sense of the field, with Sue Holwell. In an academic field in which ideas too often imitate fashion Peter Checkland’s constant pursuit of rigour and relevance in tackling complex information management problems is a model for others who follow.
Source: www.lums.lancs.ac.uk
At Lancaster, for the next 30 years with colleagues and Masters students, he led a programme of action research, much of it organised through the UK’s first university consultancy company, ISCOL. From this continuous cycle of intervention in ill-structured management problems and learning from the results, emerged a fully developed SSM. Critical to this development was Peter’s recognition that purposeful human activity can be modeled systemically. He called it Soft Systems Methodology (SSM).
Rather than SSM models attempting to map the real world – impossible because there are multiple candidates for what counts as the real world in complex situations – the models are devices for learning about the real world. In short, SSM becomes a process of inquiry, a learning system. These ideas were used extensively in the MSc in Systems, and later in the MSc in Information Management. In the field of information management Peter has been concerned with IS and its relationship to IT, and in particular the contribution that systems ideas, or the process of thinking systemically, can make to the modeling and understanding of this relationship.
Peter’s work is published in many leading journals and in four key books, including the seminal Systems Thinking, Systems Practice now in its 25th year of print, and Information, Systems and Information Systems: making sense of the field, with Sue Holwell. In an academic field in which ideas too often imitate fashion Peter Checkland’s constant pursuit of rigour and relevance in tackling complex information management problems is a model for others who follow.
Source: www.lums.lancs.ac.uk