Three Strategies for Functional Architecting: Cases from the Health Systems of Developing Countries

Abstract

Health systems in developing countries are commonly struggling with multiple and overlapping information systems (IS). There is a need to move away from this to reduce the burden of parallel reporting it creates and enable coordinated information collection and sharing. However, this is not straightforward as it prompts intricate functional architecting activities across a range of IS domains including health staff, commodities, logistics, progress tracking, financing and health services information. This paper is based on a case study of a District Health Information Software and how it is involved in the current drive toward integrated systems. From focusing on aggregate health indicators for health management, it is becoming one component among others in larger architectures where it may take on many different roles. The aim of this paper is to strengthen our understanding of the opportunities and challenges related to functionally architecting integrated systems. Applying an information Infrastructure lens, we describe these processes as involving a range of different software components and actors not under any central control. We conceptualize functional architecting as activities performed by multiple actors to configure and re-configure the functional roles of independent software components. Based on the case study, we contribute by identifying three different architecting strategies and conceptualize them as connecting, encroaching, and charting.

Keywords:

• functional architecting
• architecture
• health information systems
• Information Infrastructure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Petter Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. His research interest is related to large-scale and complex information systems. He is actively involved in researching health information systems in developing countries related to capacity building, standardization, architectures and platforms.

Johan Ivar Sæbø holds a Postdoc position at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. He has worked with health information systems in Africa and Asia for the past 10 years, focusing his research activities around implementation and scaling of such systems.