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The Ecology of Software: A Framework for the Investigation of Business-IT Integration
Abstract
From an anthropomorphic (human-like) view, we consider e-business over the Internet as a giant living human body, hence living species. From an ecological view, we extend the concept of business ecosystem by Moore (1993, 1996) to particularly include software as living species within business ecosystems. As depicted in Figure 1, we establish a parallelism between “e-business” (giant living species) driven by software (also as living species) and non-software factors (e.g. funding – not shown in Figure 1) and “the natural ecology” conditioned by multiple living species and abiotic factors (such as temperature – not shown in Figure 1). Together, the two views give rise to the concept of e-business integration as a business-IT automation continuum that ranges from bits (microscopic) to business ecosystems (macroscopic). We argue that this parallelism particularly helps define a framework for the investigation of Business-IT integration, structurally (anatomically), functionally (physiologically) and behaviorally.
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