Towards Living Cooperative Information Systems for Virtual Organizations Using Living Systems Theory

In order to conceive and design cooperative information systems to better adapt to the dynamics of modern organizations in the changing environment, this paper explores the requirements and approaches to build “living” cooperative information systems for virtual organizations – both in terms of system flexibility and co-evolution of organization and information systems. The object of our case study is the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. To meet the requirements of “living” cooperative information systems in the context of virtual organizations, we propose a unified peer-to-peer architecture based on the foundational concepts and principles of Miller’s Living Systems Theory, which is a widely accepted theory about how all living systems “work”. In our system framework, every peer belongs to one of the 6 organizational levels, e.g. peers, groups, organizations, communities, societies, supranational systems. Each level has the same types of components but different specializations. In addition, every peer has the same critical subsystems that process information. The case studies show how our architecture effectively supports the changing organization, dynamic businesses, and decentralized ownerships of resources.