Social Information Systems - The End of Shadow Applications?

Abstract

In large corporations, line-of-business organizations frequently introduce unofficial "shadow" applications to work around the limitations of the established information system. This paper presents a software architecture designed to alleviate this phenomenon, and reuses examples from a recent industry experience report to demonstrate how shadow application proliferation could be avoided without sacrificing flexibility and reactivity. We present the initial results of our prototype, and discuss the possibility of a social information system designed to both reduce the present chaos and enable the cooperative design and evolution of business applications.