From Specifications to Specific Vagueness: How Enterprise Software Mediates Engineering Relations

Relying on an ethnography of software demonstrations given by members of the product development and sales division of a system engineering company to various industrial design engineers at different sites, the article identifies patterns of specific vagueness with reference to a software graphic modeling tool. A statement is vague to the extent that it has aspects that resist inquiries. In our fieldwork on software demonstrations, sales system engineers resisted inquiries specifically concerning (i) the amount of software functions, (ii) their range, and (iii) their degree of integration. The article discusses the role of software-specific vagueness in the transition of system engineering services to the international market of enterprise architecture. Contrary to expectations concerning engineering when it is viewed as a matter of logic, in the context of the enterprise architecture software market the establishment of a common ground of reference between sales system engineers and various sorts of design engineers does not rely on solving manufacturing problems. Rather, it relies on making problems specifically vague in order to allow both the specific use of the system for the purpose at hand in a particular industrial context and the vague solution that responds to the enterprise architecture market’s logic.