Central Concerns and Questions

We are surrounded by objects of astonishing complexity, from the phones in our pockets to the planes in our skies. Many observers have noted that such complex products and systems have become possible to a large extent by migrating their functionality from special-purpose mechanical and electronic devices into software artifacts that run on general-purpose computing hardware, whose processing power has increased exponentially over the last 40 years. But the shift from designing “atoms” to designing “bits” (to use Nicholas Negroponte's famous distinction) presents daunting challenges of its own.

In particular, since software is not directly constrained by the laws of physics, software architects are typically both blessed and cursed with vastly more degrees of freedom than other kinds of engineering designers. Moreover, many large software systems are designed by geographically dispersed teams and/or economically separate firms. (The World Wide Web is an especially salient example.) In these situations, “good” software designs not only need to satisfy their functional requirements, but must also be aligned with the strategic incentives of their designers and the organisational processes by which they are developed.

Our group is engaged in a collection of research projects aimed at helping designers and developers of software-based systems to achieve this kind of alignment. A common theme in these efforts is the architecture of platforms, which are characterised by a set of relatively stable core components surrounded by an ecosystem of complementary (and often competing) products and services [1]. We are exploring the role of architectural control in platform industries [2], and developing formal techniques to reason about strategic design decisions in platform architectures [3].

We are also examining the challenges of strategic software design in a rich variety of specific contexts using a diverse range of research methods. These efforts include an analytical model of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) for online content distribution [4], a computational model of platform competition in digital systems [5], empirical studies of Web 2.0 mashups and APIs [6] and enterprise software components, and lab experiments on the relationship between the structural complexity of software applications and their maintainability over time.

Selected Publications

[1] Carliss. Y. Baldwin and C. Jason Woodard. The architecture of platforms: A unified view. In Annabelle Gawer, ed., Platforms, Markets and Innovation, Edward Elgar, 19–44, 2009.

[2] C. Jason Woodard. Architectural control points (short paper). Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST), Atlanta, 2008.

[3] C. Jason Woodard. Modeling architectural strategy using design structure networks. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST), Pasadena, 2007.

[4] Dan MA. Do RSS feeds help to gain competitive advantage? Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Waikoloa, 2009.

[5] C. Jason Woodard. Platform competition in digital systems: Architectural control and value migration. Working paper, 30 May. Presented at the 2006 Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Atlanta, 2008.

[6] Shuli Yu and C. Jason Woodard. Innovation in the programmable web: Characterizing the mashup ecosystem. Workshop Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC), LNCS 5472, 136–147, 2008.