Towards a Conceptual Model to Understand Software Ecosystems Emerging from Systems-of-Information Systems

Abstract

Software vendors are currently concerned to the development of software-intensive Information Systems (IS) that interoperate among themselves using web and/or mobile platforms. This phenomenon has risen the concept of System-of-Information Systems (SoIS), which is a set of interoperable and independent IS that exchange data and combine synergistic services to achieve broader business goals. Since new types of sociotechnical relations can be established to increase gains and productivity in this context, considering technical, business and social dimensions, Software Ecosystems (SECO) emerge as a theoretical lens to study SoIS. We claim that the software ecosystem perspective can foster the comprehension about SoIS by exploring the existing relations among constituent ISs within a SoIS as well as the nature of such relations. The main contribution of this work is to offer a conceptual model to support SoIS analysis under a SECO perspective, rising the idea of EcoSoIS. Coding analysis was applied to extract the main concepts of SoIS and SECO from experts and to link these concepts to compose the conceptual model. Smart city was used as an example to illustrate how the model could be instantiated. Once the model enables a conformant representation of the smart city SoIS under a SECO lens, we believe that the model can be used for other SoIS.