Majan, Rajen

r.madan@lse.ac.uk

Understanding the Scientist of the Artificial: the role of IS architects in large financial service organisations

The key challenges of information age organisations are posited as complexity, uncertainty and high rates of change. This is particularly true of financial service and professional service organisations that are focused on the information value chain.

The concept of straight through processing (STP) in financial markets best exemplifies these challenges. A simple functionality, such as 'one click' completion of a securities transaction electronically, can mean that entire national and international corporate information infrastructures may need to be traversed, re-engineered and harmonised. Set within such an environment the research aims to highlight the unique problems and challenges of designing, managing and supporting information systems (IS) in large globally dispersed organisations that need to be manoeuvrable in the face of significant business diversity; and discusses the related evolving roles of IS management.

The main research enquiry is exploratory and concerned with understanding the relatively recently instituted roles of IS architects in these organisations. The research draws on works on design, organisations and praxis as informed by Herbert Simon, Donald Schon, Chris Argyris and Henry Mintzberg. Information systems are regarded as socio-technical projects and the IS architect is viewed as a social designer who is concerned with converting actual situations to preferred situations and balancing aesthetics with functionality, as espoused by Simon, and which is consistent with the initial findings of the research.

The research examines key issues which the social designer faces having to do with problem representation, inadequacies and unreliability in the data, constraints on cognitive capacity and attention, and ambiguity and conflict of goals.

Supervisor: Carsten Sørensen, PhD

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