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Traditional ISD methods have been criticized for placing too much emphasis, at least implicitly, on stability of IS development activities (Truex and Baskerville, 1998). Advocates of so-called lightweight methods (Beck, 2000; Cockburn, 2000) have presented similar thoughts. Discussions on IS development in emergent organizations (Truex et al., 1999) provide recent profound critique of ISD methods (Truex et al., 2000). In fact, advocates of IS development in emergent organizations have set new goals for developing ISs (Truex et al., 1999). Emergent organizations are organizations that constantly try to adapt to their changing environments, but they never achieve the stability they are striving for. The idea of emergent organizations as it bears on IS development stems from (Truex et al., 1999; Truex and Baskerville, 1998). They see that emergent organizations have a constantly changing environment in which they ongoingly try to adapt to meet the evolving requirements. In fact,” ideal” emergent organizations are always in change—they will never achieve any stability (Truex et al., 1999).

As can be seen from above, emergent organizations are the very opposite to stabile organizations. Due to fundamentally different assumptions on the nature of reality and IS development, the process for designing stabile and emergent ISs are seen different (Truex et al., 1999). In fact, the process in these two cases follow