Proceedings of the 2007 Southern Association for Information Systems Conference 251 CHAOS THEORY AS A META-THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE FOR IS STRATEGY : DISCUSSION OF THE INSIGHTS AND IMPLICATIONS Sergey Samoilenko Virginia Commonwealth University svsergey@vcu.org Kweku-Muata Osei-Bryson Virginia Commonwealth University Kweku.Muata@isy.vcu.edu Abstract Development and implementation of IS strategy often takes place within a complex and uncertain socio-technical environment. Under such circumstances any predictions of the future states of an organization and organizational IS are understandably limited. We believe that Chaos Theory can provide a valuable vantage point, as well as offer a set of insights and implications, to those practitioners who are involved in the decision making process during the development and implementation of IS strategy. Keywords: Chaos Theory, IS Strategy, Complexity, Complex Dynamic Non-Linear Deterministic Systems Introduction The purpose of this paper is to argue that Chaos Theory could provide a solid theoretical foundation for researching Information Systems (IS) strategy. The main argument is based on the premise that an organizational IS could be perceived as a complex non-linear dynamic system, and as such it could exhibit a pattern of behavior that is usually studied by means of Chaos Theory. To substantiate the argument, this paper proceeds as a sequence of three parts. Part 1 presents an overviews of the characteristics of non-linear dynamic systems and of the major tenets of Chaos Theory, as well as presents the argument that organizational IS can be perceived as a non-linear dynamic system. Part 2 provides a brief overview of IS strategy and inquires into the areas of IS strategy that may benefit from the insights provided by Chaos theory. Part 3 considers some of the implications of the insights that offer benefit in the area of IS strategy. Part 1: Complex Non-Linear Dynamic Systems Complex systems exhibit a common set of basic characteristics (Morel and Ramanujam, 1999): 1) a complex system (CS) must contain a large number of interacting parts (Simon, 1962) kept under the control of a feedback mechanism, which causes the behavior of the system to be hard to predict due to nonlinearity of the feedback- controlled type of behavior (Casti, 1994); and 2) a large number of components interacting in nonlinear fashion give rise to the emergent properties of the system, which manifest themselves in the form of the observable and empirically verifiable patterns (Morel and Ramanujam, 1999). A system is considered to be dynamic if its state or behavior changes with time in linear or non-linear fashion. Chaos theory (CT) pertains to the study of nonlinear dynamic system (Levy, 1994) and can be defined as the qualitative study of unstable aperiodic behavior in deterministic nonlinear dynamical systems (Kellert, 1993). CT is the qualitative study because “in the case of nonlinear equations expressing rates of change, no general formula exists for arriving at solutions for successive points in time” (Kamminga, 1990). CT is the study of unstable