Interpreting socio‐technical co‐evolution: Applying complex adaptive systems to IS engagement

This paper seeks to understand how software systems and organisations co‐evolve in practice during an IS engagement. Seeks also to argue that complex adaptive system theory (CAS) provides an excellent lens to study the motor of co‐evolution due to its ability to frame the strategies and reinforcement models of actors and to illustrate this by recounting four narratives of the interaction, selection and adaptation of actors arising from a longitudinal case study of an IS engagement. Then sets out to consider how the complexity of the engagement emerges from the interrelationship of these narratives and how the adaptive behaviour of the various actors is both a response to and a driver of co‐evolution within the engagement.

An interpretive case study was undertaken to examine the implementation of a novel academic scheduling and resource allocation system at a research‐intensive Australian university. The research was conducted over ten months, employing ethnographic methods and semi‐structured interviews. This analysis is conducted within the theoretical framework of CAS.

By analysing this case study it is demonstrated how CAS can help designers and managers of IS engagements conceptualise the attendant complexities that they encounter. It is also demonstrated how complexity within IS engagements emerges through the interactions and goal‐seeking behaviour of actors employing a variety of context‐bound strategies within neighbourhoods, and how the adaptive behaviour of the various actors is both a response to and a driver of co‐evolution within the engagement.

This work builds on Organization Science, Vol. 10 Nos 3 and 5, by applying CAS theory to organisational and IS research on co‐evolution, where the findings are grounded in a longitudinal case study and not computational models.