Information-Systems Architecture Sample Clauses

Information-Systems Architecture. 3.3.1 Information Architecture

Information-Systems Architecture. The main assumption of the research model is that an information system architecture can be manipulated to be aligned with the changing external environment. The model of the organizational ISA mirrors the construction of reality, with m = 10 dimensions ranging from 0 to 9. Each dimension in the ISA corresponds to the respective dimension in the external environment. Coming back to the example of changing customer needs, the corresponding ISA dimension could be a customer relationship management system (CRMS). If customers changed their communications preferences from calling using a phone to subscribing to an RSS feed, the CMRS needs be changed to provide the desired communication channel to the customer. Thus, the ISA dimension needs to align as closely as possible to the trait observed in the external environment. Outside of the ISA vector, which represents the current configuration of the architecture, there are internal factors that affect the ISA’s ability to change. First, there are the systems characteristics that have been identified to influence the reconfigurability of the ISA. The system characteristics are randomly assigned at the beginning of the experiment, are considered to be exogenous, and thus do not change over the course of the experiment. Coupling of the system (cp) is modeled as a single integer from 1 to 9. The values of coupling are ordinal. A value of 1 signifies that ISA dimensions, or subsystems, are on average linked with one other subsystem. If a subsystem is coupled with all other subsystems, cp has a value of 9. Hence, loosely coupled architectures, which only depend on few other subsystems to function, have a low coupling. Modularity (mo) is also modeled as a single integer ranging from 1 to 9. As with coupling, the values are ordinal. The value describes the concurrency of access to different subsystems. A value of 1 describes a scenario where only 1 of the 10 dimensions can be changed during an adaption cycle. A high modularity value of 9 would allow for concurrent changes of up to 9 subsystems during an adaptation cycle. System interoperability (psi) is modeled a probability ranging from 0 to 0.05. The characteristic describes the probability of substituting a single ISA dimension with the trait of the corresponding reality vector. It can be interpreted as the likelihood for sourcing a single subsystem solution from an external vendor. Hence, the higher the interoperability value, the more likely is a dimension of the IS...