Web Services and emergent organizations: opportunities and challenges for IS development

We are living in exciting times, in which technological innovation and new forms of organization are advancing at a very fast pace. On the organizational side, the lack of stability of the so-called "emergent" organizations, those that are in continuous evolution and transformation, represents a big challenge for Information Systems Development practices and technologies: in a fast changing organization, there may be no "optimal" set of specifications for an Information System and even the traditional concept of the Information System life cycle may need to be replaced by one involving the idea of continuous development. On the technological side, the diffusion of Internet-based platforms and, in particular, the recent introduction of the so-called "Web Services" technological standard for dynamic component-based software development may represent a potentially interesting opportunity to build continuously changing Information Systems. In this contribution we start exploring this territory, focusing on the concepts of emergent systems and continuous development, explaining the major characteristics of Web services technology and the potential uses of it, and delineating the essential paths of a study in progress in which the final research objective is to evaluate the impact of this new technological standard on Information Systems development practices.