Manifesting Shared Affordances in System Development – the System Anatomy

In complex systems’ development, it is necessary to understand how things depend on each other in order to plan and control the development task. Ericsson, a major supplier of telecommunication systems all over the world, has successfully used a construct called the system anatomy for this purpose. The anatomy shows, in a compact way, the crucial functional dependencies in the system. Since the anatomy has had a profound practical impact, it is relevant to analyse how this construct can be grounded also theoretically. In this paper, we present such a grounding in which the anatomy and its associated plans are seen as manifestations of affordances. These affordances enable different groups of actors to reconcile their actions. Besides affordances, the theory is grounded in the Russian theory of activity and the Activity Domain Theory. The findings indicate that the suggested theory is a promising socio-technical approach that may complement existing approaches for development of complex systems.