History
Rittel’s interest lay in the area of public policy and planning, which is also the context in which he defined wicked problems. So it is no surprise that Rittel and Kunz envisaged IBIS as the:
"...type of information system meant to support the work of cooperatives like governmental or administrative agencies or committees, planning groups, etc., that are confronted with a problem complex in order to arrive at a plan for decision...".
When the paper was written, there were three manual, paper-based IBIS-type systems in use - two in government agencies and one in a university.
A renewed interest in IBIS-type systems came about in the following decade, when advances in technology made it possible to design relatively inexpensive, computer-based IBIS-type systems. Jeff Conklin and co-workers adapted the IBIS structure for use in software engineering, creating the gIBIS (graphical IBIS) hypertext system in the late 1980s. Several other graphical IBIS-type systems were developed once it was realised that such systems facilitated collaborative design and problem solving. These efforts culminated in the creation of the open source Compendium (software) tool which supports - among other things - a graphical IBIS notation. Similar tools which do not rely on a database for storage include DRed and designVUE.
In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in IBIS-type systems, particularly in the context of sensemaking and collaborative problem solving in a variety of social and technical contexts. Of particular note is facilitation method called dialogue mapping which uses the IBIS notation to map out a design (or any other) dialogue as it evolves.
Lately, online versions of dialogue- and issue-mapping tools have appeared, for example, bCisive Online (see the link below).
Read more about this topic: Issue-Based Information System
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—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)