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Complexity in Information Systems Development pp 101–116Cite as

Endogenously Emergent Information Systems

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation ((LNISO,volume 22))

Abstract

This paper analyzes the concept of “emergence” in the context of information systems (IS) and discusses its implications to IS research. The analysis shows that this literature assumes emergence to be an outcome of exogenous, although, complex design agency, largely omitting endogenous emergence, rising from the complexity of the information system and its operational interaction with its environment. Reflecting the IS perspective, the paper reviews research on endogenous emergence conducted especially in Computer Science and Software Engineering.

A prior version of this paper has been published in the ISD2016 Proceedings (http://aisel.aisnet.org/isd2014/proceedings2016).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that there seems to be some differences of opinion of what Turing had in mind or what Turing Machine as a model of computing implies [17].

  2. 2.

    Predictability is, of course, a matter of degree. Therefore, many qualities of information and software systems such as reliability, maintainability, efficiency can be regarded as emergent properties—they are system-level qualities hard to reduce to the system components and usually not completely predictable.

  3. 3.

    I interpret “organization” in a broad meaning here so that in addition to formal organizations it covers more informal organizations such as families and various online communities.

  4. 4.

    These levels are developed keeping simulation models in mind, but illustrate that deliberate and safe integration of systems requires getting acquainted with a huge amount meta-information the systems to be integrated.

  5. 5.

    Users here can be interpreted to cover not only human users in the external environment of the IS artifact, but also various objects in the environment that generate input streams and/or receive output streams.

  6. 6.

    One should note that our interest here is not in initial of training of the system to classify documents, for example, but in the automatic learning by the system while in use.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    J. Iivari

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  1. J. Iivari
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Knowledge Engineering, University of Economics in Katowice, Katowice, Poland

    Jerzy Goluchowski

  2. Department of Informatics, University of Economics in Katowice, Katowice, Poland

    Malgorzata Pankowska

  3. Caulfield School Information Technology, Monash University, Caulfield East, Victoria, Australia

    Henry Linger

  4. Cairnes School of Business & Economics, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

    Chris Barry

  5. Cairnes School of Business & Economics, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

    Michael Lang

  6. Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Christoph Schneider

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Iivari, J. (2017). Endogenously Emergent Information Systems. In: Goluchowski, J., Pankowska, M., Linger, H., Barry, C., Lang, M., Schneider, C. (eds) Complexity in Information Systems Development. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52593-8_7

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