Can Information System Engineering Make Cyber-Human Systems Smarter?

The term smart is often used carelessly in relation to systems, devices, and other entities such as cities that capture or otherwise process or use information. This exploratory paper takes the idea of smartness seriously as a way to reveal basic issues related to IS engineering and its possibilities and limitations. This paper defines work system, cyber-human system, digital agent, smartness of systems and devices, and IS engineering. It links those ideas to IS engineering challenges related to cyber-human systems. Those challenges call for applying ideas that are not applied often in IS engineering, such as facets of work, roles and responsibilities of digital agents, patterns of interaction between people and digital agents, knowledge objects, and a range of criteria for evaluating cyber-human systems and digital agents. In combination, those ideas point to new possibilities for expanding IS engineering to reflect emerging challenges related to making cyber-human systems smarter.