Organizational information systems and biological cells: potential directions for learning?

The literature acknowledges the relationship between the study of biological systems and that of social and technological systems. However, while the relationship between the two seems to offer valuable insights, there has been little literature on how insights from the research on information behavior of cells can inform the research of organizational IS. Reflecting this literature gap, the objective of this preliminary Research-in-Progress paper is to raise an awareness of possible new insights from biological IS, as well as to demonstrate how such insights might be incorporated into organizational IS research. In this paper we suggest a few directions for progress that may be interest to IS researchers and illustrate it by exploring one specific example: information overload, which is an issue faced by both biological and organizational IS. By drawing on the similarities and differences between biological and organizational IS, potential information practices to address information overload are explored, using the concept of Information Thresholds.

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