Digital cement: Information system architecture, complexity, and flexibility

This research is about the relationship between the collection of software components that comprises an organization's information system and the organization's ability to respond to changes in its business and technology environment. One characteristic of an information system is that different components depend on each other for data and processing. The pattern of these dependencies is the information system's architecture. Responding to business and technology changes often involves modifying the information system and the speed and cost of making changes to the information system is a measure of the system's flexibility. The specific research question is: "How does information system architecture affect information system flexibility?";This research develops measures of architectural and component complexity and hypothesizes that these constructs affect one dimension of information system flexibility: architectural flexibility-to-change, a property of an information system that enables changes to be made to the architecture with little penalty in time, effort, cost, or performance. Complexity affects both the difficulty of performing design tasks and discovering high value designs. The hypotheses are tested by (1) collecting component and dependency data from a biopharmaceutical company's information system, (2) combining this data with survey, system instrumentation, and archive data, and then (3) estimating and interpreting multiple regression models.;The general conclusions from the research are that both complexity at the component level and complexity at the architectural level affect information system flexibility. A component's closeness centrality, data complexity, and procedural complexity predict its architectural flexibility-to-change. This research adds to the theories of information system architecture, information system flexibility, information system design, and information system measurement. It shows the value of descriptive information system architectures by linking them to the cost of maintaining and modifying the information system. The managerial implications are that organizations can monitor their information system architectures through visualizations and analysis in order to better understand their existing system and guide subsequent design activities.