Viable Systems Model in Information Systems Development

and sustainable-these are the features expected from enterprises in the 21st century [1]. To obtain these features enterprises need appropriate models of functioning. The Viable Systems Model (VSM) [2] has been suggested as an alternative for highly competitive enterprise models [3, 4, 5]. The VSM is rooted in the ideas of cybernetics [6] and comprises five mutually related systems [5]: System 1 is responsible for the production and delivery of enterprise goods or services to the pertinent environment; System 2 is intended to make the set of organizational units which comprise System 1; the task of System 3 is to manage the set of operational units comprising System 1; System 4 is mainly responsible for decisions regarding the future role of the enterprise in the environment; System 5's function is to balance the present and future of the enterprise; it constitutes the maximum authority in the enterprise. One of the essential features of the VSM is its suitability for supporting self-organization and variety handling, e.g., System 5 can absorb all the variety that Systems 3 and 4 cannot absorb between themselves. In the context of information systems development research the VSM is relevant for two reasons: (1) it is necessary to investigate what the information systems requirements are for enterprises that base their functionality on the VSM; and (2) the applicability of the VSM for information systems where an information system is an enterprise functioning according to the VSM has to be analyzed further [7]. Currently research in these areas is quite fragmentary. Most of the work so far has focused on the fractal nature of the information systems [8, 9]. The VSM prescribes a fractal architecture of the enterprise [3, 10], however it is not clear how exactly fractality has to be addressed with respect of five systems of the VSM at the business level and separately at the information systems level. From the point of view of fractality, the interplay between both levels has been considered in [11], however only in the case where both the enterprise at the business level and the information system are structured as fractal systems. There can be situations where the VSM and/or fractal architecture are applied only at the business level [5] or only at the information systems level. New models of business and information systems alignment might be necessary for handling these situations of heterogonous systems architectures at different levels of …