Information System Architecture: Toward A Distributed Cognition Perspective

摘要

Organizations make substantial investments in their information system architectures, yet extant theory on information system architecture often regards the architect as having a great deal of design freedom. This paper argues that information system architecting can be profitably viewed as distributed cognition in which multiple decision-makers influence the evolution of an information system's architecture. A set of guidelines are constructed from the literature that can be used to characterize the degree to which a set of activities constitutes distributed cognition. Interview data is then used from three sites engaged in information system architecting to illustrate why architecting is difficult and how a distributed cognition perspective helps us understand it. The paper concludes by arguing that although the architecting process can be described as distributed cognition, the practice of architecting is constrained by the absence of representations that facilitate cross-group discussions of the architecture.