Architecting a distributed system for data sharing

Over a year and a half, we followed an architect's daily work alongside his team members, engaged together in the design and development of a distributed system for the sharing of data in Swiss agriculture.Organizations in the sector, both public and private, were invited to exchange data by transmission, with the authorization of the data-owners, i.e., the farmers.At the time we entered the field in January 2018, the system was in its early conceptualizations.In July 2019 a first operational prototype had entered production.This marked the end of our fieldwork.This report is ethnographic in nature but also technical in some respects, since it sometimes requires going into the details of the functioning of the target system.To present its results, the first author of this article, who is a sociologist, joined forces with the architect, who is also a trained computer scientist.We will return to this partnership when we present our methodology.We first summarize research on the notion of IT architecture to highlight some qualifications previously made to the work of architects and what we see as their limitations.The next section presents our case study, methods, and research materials.It is followed by our results.The final section relates these results to current research to highlight our contributions and outline some directions for future research.