Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Over a year and a half, we followed an architect's daily work alongside his team members, engaged together in the design and development of a distributed system for the sharing of data in Swiss agriculture.Organizations in the sector, both public and private, were invited to exchange data by transmission, with the authorization of the data-owners, i.e., the farmers.At the time we entered the field in January 2018, the system was in its early conceptualizations.In July 2019 a first operational prototype had entered production.This marked the end of our fieldwork.This report is ethnographic in nature but also technical in some respects, since it sometimes requires going into the details of the functioning of the target system.To present its results, the first author of this article, who is a sociologist, joined forces with the architect, who is also a trained computer scientist.We will return to this partnership when we present our methodology.We first summarize research on the notion of IT architecture to highlight some qualifications previously made to the work of architects and what we see as their limitations.The next section presents our case study, methods, and research materials.It is followed by our results.The final section relates these results to current research to highlight our contributions and outline some directions for future research. STATE OF THE ARTIn their exploratory state of the art, Vassilakopoulou and Grisot (ibid.)identify three ways of qualifying architecture, each supporting distinct research objectives.The first, called technical/structural, links architecture to the structure of a system, its components, their operating principles, and their interconnections.This definition would dominate the engineering literature whose research objective would be to develop frameworks and models to support the design process.The second, called enterprise architecture, views architecture as a socio-technical arrangement of software, hardware, organizational structures, and work practices.It would dominate the management literature whose research objective would be to define good management practices to support the design process, taking into account the needs of organizations that use systems.The last one, called strategic, designates architecture as the result of a process that aligns heterogeneous business and technical elements.It would dominate the innovation literature, which would focus on the benefits and challenges of technical Léa Stiefel & Alain Sandoz Working paper 27.05.22
Source: IRIS
Authors: Stiefel, Léa, Sandoz, Alain
Institutions: University of Lausanne, University of Neuchâtel
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7063969858
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: