Revisiting the Impact of Information Systems Architecture Complexity: A Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective

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Jannis Beese    Mohammad Kazem Haki    Raphael David Schilling    Robert Winter    Stephan Aier   

Organizations constantly adapt their Information Systems (IS) architecture to reflect changes in their environment. In general, such adaptations steadily increase the complexity of their IS architecture, thereby negatively impacting IS efficiency and IS flexibility. Based on a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) perspective, we present a more differentiated analysis of the impact of IS architecture complexity. We hypothesize the relation between IS architecture complexity on the one hand, and IS efficiency and IS flexibility on the other hand to be mediated by evolutionary and revolutionary IS change. Subsequently, we test our hypotheses through a partial least squares (PLS) approach to structural equation modelling (SEM) based on survey data from 185 respondents. We find that the direct negative impact of IS architecture complexity on IS efficiency and IS flexibility is no longer statistically relevant when also considering the mediating effects of revolutionary and evolutionary IS change.

Published in 2017

Publisher: ICIS 2017 Proceedings

Open Access Link

Date added: 11/18/2017

Complexity    Enterprise Architecture   

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