Ambidextrous IS Architecture: Balancing Control and Emergence

Increasing information systems (IS) investments have not only supported business growth, but also resulted in a significant degree of complexity in organizations’ IS landscape. The latter has been reflect-ed in a considerable amount of IS and their interrelations in an organization. To tackle the ever-increasing complexity of IS landscapes, scholars and practitioners have propagated the notion of IS architecture. IS architecture aims to capture “the fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution”.
Pursuing the fundamental premises of IS architecture—in harnessing the unbounded growth and rising complexity levels—brought about the advent of the enterprise architecture (EA) field in IS research. EA literature predominantly examines intra-organizational IS architecture and promotes a control-centered approach, aimed at ensuring stability, cohesion, and efficiency in holistically organizing the IS land-scape. Current studies are hence dominated by frameworks, standards, and principles for strictly fol-lowing pre-defined, overarching objectives in IS investments within an organization. Nevertheless, scholars and practitioners have recently started to acknowledge the emergent character of IS architecture, highlighting an organization’s need for flexibility in proactively adapting to the ever-changing requirements of their business and IT environments. The latter raises the critical question of how organizations balance the need for control and simultaneously the urge for dealing with the emergent evolution in their IS architecture. In addition, organizations interactively and jointly perform in a networked business ecosystem comprising partners, customers, and other stakeholders that extend the daily business of an organization beyond its organizational boundaries. This networked, inter-organizational business logic has been leveraged by recent technological developments such as digital platforms. Therefore, in this study, we aim to theorize control and emergence as complementary aspects—as two sides of the same coin—in IS architecture through examining the architecture of novel but influential inter-organizational and net-worked IS instances.
To afford control and emergence not as distinctive, but complementary sides of IS architecture, we opt for the lens of organizational ambidexterity, describing an organization’s capability to simultaneously pursue opposing activities of exploration and exploitation. Through this lens, we seek to understand how organizations may effectively reconcile control and emergence in their IS architecture endeavours, and hence cater this understanding to (re-)conceptualize IS architecture. To more closely account for the emergent evolution of IS architecture, we opt for complex adaptive systems (CAS) as an ancillary theoretical lens. In particular we focus digital platforms as a timely and opportune instantiation of IS architecture and eventually aim to generalize insights from studying digital platforms in (re-)conceptualizing IS architecture and its corresponding instantiations (e.g., EA). We opt for digital platforms as the object of analysis due to the following reasons: Digital platforms represent a recent but rapidly growing dis-course in both research and practice; digital platforms represent a preeminent application of technology to enable networked business interactions and have to be adaptive in respect to their business ecosystem; the ambidextrous design of digital platforms to leverage both control and emergence has become a prominent discourse in research on digital platform development.