Abstract
Collaboration now plays an important role in many organizations. Many organizations often see collaboration as a given and provide a myriad of communication tools ranging from e-mail through workspaces to video conferencing. Assumptions are then made that these tools will be used in a productive manner. However, there are now many example of where goals are not achieved through ad-hoc use of technologies as collaboration is often not aligned to business practice, especially to changing business practices. This paper calls for an approach to align technology use to the enterprise practices.
The paper models enterprises as a system of systems where systems are closely integrated through collaborative spaces. These spaces change during system change. The paper provides a set of concepts to describe a system of system and shows how this can be used to align collaboration to the emerging business relationships. The proposed concepts, in contrast to existing methods, place greater emphasis on social structures. They support the idea of a collaborative architecture, which defines the alignment of social collaborative arrangements to business activities through the creation or rearrangement of collaborative spaces. The goal is to get away from traditional approaches in choosing the best pattern based on history, but to encourage design thinking through experimentation at the business structure level. The paper then describes the kinds of tools needed to support modelling based on these concepts.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Best, M.L., Kumar, R.: Sustainability Failures of Rural Telecenters: Challenges from Sustainable Access in Rural India (SARI) Project. Information Technologies and Development 4(4), 31–45 (2008)
Brown, T.: Design Thinking. Harvard Business Review, 84–93 (June 2008)
Camillus, J.C.: Strategy as a Wicked Problem. Harvard Business Review, 99–106 June 2008
Ciborra, C.: The Platform Organization: Recombining Strategies, Structures, and Surprises. Organization Science 7(2), 103–118 (1996)
Cova, B., Salle, R.: Marketing solutions in accordance with S-D logic: Co-creating value with customer network actors. Industrial Marketing Management 37, 270–277 (2008)
Hawryszkiewycz, I.T.: A Metamodel for Modeling Collaborative Systems. Journal of Computer Information Systems XLV(3), 63–72 (2005)
Hawryszkiewycz, I.T.: Knowledge Management: Organizing the Knowledge Based Enterprise. Palgrave-Macmillan (2010)
Ibrahim, Z., Ainin, S.: Community Technology project in Malaysia: Kodai. Kom. The Journal of Community Informatics 9(1) (2013)
Lane, T., Swanson, G.A.: Application of Living Systems Theory to the Study of Management. Organizational Behavior 38(3) (1993)
Martin, R.: The Design of Business. Harvard Business Press (2009); Martin, R.L.: The Innovation Catalysts Harvard Business Review, pp.82-88 (2011)
McAfee, A.P.: Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. MIT Sloan Management Review, 21–28 (2006)
Merali, Y., McKelvey, B.: Using Complexity Science to effect a paradigm shift in Information systems for the 21st. century. Journal of Information Technology 21, 211–215 (2006)
Miller, J.: Living Systems. McGraw-Hill, New York (1978)
Pisano, G.P., Verganti, R.: What Kind of Collaboration is Right for You. Harvard Business Review 83(8), 80–86 (2008)
Prahalad, C.K., Krishnan, M.S.: The New Age of Innovation. McGraw-Hill (2008)
Yoo, C.-B., Hawryszkiewycz, I.T., Kang, K.-S.: Multi-perspective Framework to Improve the Knowledge Flow. In: Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Knowledge Management, pp. 988–996 (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hawryszkiewycz, I. (2013). A System of Systems Approach to Managing Emergence in Complex Environments. In: Dwivedi, Y.K., Henriksen, H.Z., Wastell, D., De’, R. (eds) Grand Successes and Failures in IT. Public and Private Sectors. TDIT 2013. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 402. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38862-0_39
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38862-0_39
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38861-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-38862-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)