Infrastructure and Infrastructuring as a Bridge Between Information Systems Design and Organization Design

This paper discusses infrastructure as a bridging mechanism between organization design and software engineering. By focusing attention on the properties and characteristics of information infrastructures as socio-technical systems, organization designing is presented as an activity equivalent to infrastructuring. In parallel, information systems design also stands to benefit from the intellectual platform known as work-related infrastructure, mainly due the capacity afforded by such a platform to make work-related connections and dependencies visible. The paper proposes a framework which enables the distinction between three layers of the organizational infrastructure(infrastructural background status, work development and design-in-use) and two modes of organizing (planning and situated). The distinction between infrastructural background and work development highlights the effects of the organizational legacy on all forms of work development, thereby informing information systems and organization design, at the macro level. The distinction between work development and design-in-use, which arises from another novel concept – points of infrastructure – brings in a host of a new opportunities in terms of improvements to organizational and information systems effectiveness.