System

The term system is pretty overloaded. I’ll define it as:

A system is a set of rules, agreements and relationships that allow individual parts to produce a result

A system is very much an organism. It requires resources and produces waste. It evolves and has its own goals which may conflict with that of its creators, and even its individual parts.

This definition isn’t too far off from what Google will give you anyway:

1. A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole, especially.
2. An organism as a whole, especially with regard to its vital processes or functions.

There’s an interesting book named “How complex systems fail”