A CATWOE analysis on dissertation work

In assessing the appropriateness of a dissertation proposal (and subsequently the finished dissertation report), I think it is useful to adopt a CATWOE analysis. CATWOE analysis is a technique from Peter Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology. Specifically, CATWOE stand for:

a. customers (C): who are the beneficiaries of your dissertation work, e.g. target readers of the dissertation works? What specific benefits will they obtain from  reading your dissertation work? These determine the practical and academic values of your study.
b. actors (A): Who are involved in carrying out which parts of the dissertation work? It is possible that, in a student's dissertation work, other people are also involved in various tasks, e.g. survey form processing, and in various roles, e.g. as participating members in an action research. This should be made clear in your proposal.
c. transformation (T): What inputs (and in what state) are processed in the dissertation process? What are the processed state of the inputs (in this case, treated outputs)? Inputs can be entities such as certain people, certain organizations.
d. worldview (W): what are the main hypotheses, viewpoints, values and ethical stances underlying the dissertation work? What is the guarantor which ensure that the chosen research methods are able to produce valid and relevant knowledge?
e. owner(s) (O): who are in a position to approve or stop the dissertation work?
f: environmental constraints (E): what are the resource, technical, ethical, cultural and legal constraints of the dissertation work?

Before conducting a CATWOE analysis, it is vital to capture the main ideas of a dissertation proposal in  the form of a root definition (which is also a concept in soft systems methodology), such as: "An action-research-based research process carried by an MBA student to implement a Business Intelligence (BI) system in ABC Ltd successfully while yielding valid and useful knowledge in BI system  implementation for small-and-medium-sized companies, subject to the regulation constraints of XYZ University on dissertation work". With a root definition formulated, a CATWOE analysis can now be conducted on it.

Reviewing a dissertation proposal (and dissertation report) with these questions derived from CATWOE analysis should prompt you (the disseration student) to come up with a more appropriate proposal; after all, dissertation work is a kind of human activity system in soft systems term with CATWOE considerations.

References

1. Hints on disseration proposal writing: http://www.soc.napier.ac.uk/~hazelh/diss/diss_outline.htm
2. On disseratation proposal writing: http://www.online-dissertation-help.com/dissertation_proposal.htm
3. On CATWOE analysis: http://www.articlesbase.com/human-resources-articles/root-definition-catwoe-model-1517634.html