THE CHALLENGE: Extensive research efforts are ongoing to ensure long-term competitiveness for Swedish system building industry, such as WASP[1] (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program), where technology development, including software development, for future intelligent systems is addressed. This development has potentially major consequences for organizations that develop, provide, and utilize future complex and intelligent systems. Maintaining some of these systems’ functions will be crucial to many functions in society, such as various infrastructure like transport systems, communications systems, and healthcare. The development is disruptive in character and changes the conditions for the actors in the system-building industry (see WASP’s Technology Foresight 2018). Closely related to this technology development, a number of management challenges are emerging, such as:

The emergence of ecosystems for dynamic and intelligent platform-based systems. This overthrows traditional principles of organizational design that are often based on direct mirroring of the system architecture (also referred to as "mirroring hypothesis" / Conway's law), where a typical situation is that there is a responsible organizational unit for each subsystem in the system. In the face current developments, new perspectives on the links between the system architecture and the organization need to be developed as a result of the emergence of ecosystems, new types of layered system architectures, the intelligent evolution of systems, the creation of training data, and the emergence of new types of actors such as data factories.

Complexity beyond human cognitive understanding creates a need to re-evaluate existing insights into bounded rationality (Simon, 1972) into a new understanding of rationality that recognizes that human cognition and the intelligence of systems are strongly interwoven. Such rationality may be understood as generative and open and potentially culminates in a paradigm shift in management knowledge. Based on this, new management approaches need to be developed, e.g. how emerging complexity can be embraced (Garud et al., 2013).