Given their need to manage the information they have under control, organizations usually choose among two types of widely used IT solutions: 1) information systems based on databases (DBIS) that are powerful but expensive to develop and not much flexible; 2) spreadsheets, which threaten the integrity of the data and are limited in exploiting it. In this paper we propose a new type of IT solution, namely information microsystems (MicroIS), that aims at reconciling the best of these two worlds: the low development and maintenance costs, ease of use and flexibility of spreadsheets, with the structure, semantics and integrity of DBIS. The goal is not to replace any of the above two paradigms but to lie somewhere in between depending on the changing needs of the organization. From the various possible points of interest of this IT solution, the article will focus specifically on issues related to data management, introducing the conceptual model of MicroIS, the transformations and validations that can be done around it, and they way in which the structure of the information is inferred from the data that users provide.

Peer Reviewed