[AISWorld] Who are the Champions of IS?

[Helen Hasan]

Guy and John
Just back from ICIS where the panel that Rick organised picked up on this theme.  My thoughts are that despite our claims of relevance and that we are investigating topic that have societal value, our message is still delivered mainly within the academic IS community. Just yesterday I was asked what my discipline was and when I replied "Information Systems" I received the usual blank stare and had to try and explain.  I attended the UN  Rio+20 conference on sustainable development last year and of the hundreds of events only 2 minor ones were in any way connected with IT let alone IS.  When other groups were struggling to maintain global networks, manage and interpret data, provide decision support etc, I felt that the knowledge and skills of our IS community could be so valuable and yet nobody there knows about us.  I would like to see the AIS have a voice on this sort of stage the same way other professions (medicine, law etc) do.
Cheers
Helen

Helen Hasan
Associate Professor in Information Systems
Faculty of Business
University of Wollongong NSW 2522
P + 61 2 4221 3757
F + 61 2 4221 3725
M 0419403699
W  http://www.uow.edu.au/~hasan/
Tw: https://twitter.com/bottlingfog
BE GREEN! Read from the screen

From: aisworld-bounces at lists.aisnet.org [mailto:aisworld-bounces at lists.aisnet.org] On Behalf Of John Venable
Sent: Monday, 16 December 2013 1:41 PM
To: Guy Gable; aisworld at lists.aisnet.org
Subject: Re: [AISWorld] Who are the Champions of IS?

Hi Guy (et al.),

Thanks for this missive on the recently completed ACIS conference and for your and other's roles/contributions to the ACIS panel on "'Transforming the future with sensitivity to the past".

Re. Rick Watson's and others' messages about encouraging a focus on societal value - as opposed to a primary focus on enabling business profit - there is indeed much already happening in IS research institutions, including at QUT as you point out. Much work is already being done on Green IS/IT, Health Informatics, IT/IS support for education, eGovernment, and IT/IS support for Not-for-Profit organisations, some of it in Schools of IS and some of it in computer science or elsewhere. Jan Pries-Heje, Deborah Bunker, Nancy Russo, and I chaired a joint IFIP 8.2 + 8.6 conference in Perth in 2010 on Design and Diffusion of Systems for Human Benefit. There was also a special issue of IT&P out of that conference. As you point out, all of this is rooted in the values that we choose to serve with our research.

Re. the "hard separation of theorising-building-evaluating in Design Science", the intention in that model is not one of a hard separation. Rather it is to emphasise that all three parts are needed (for good DSR) and there is flexibility in the order that they are done, with potentially much cycling back and forth between the activities. Indeed, they may be very tightly intertwined, as came out in the discussion.

More importantly though, re. champions of IS, certainly our professional/academic societies/organisations are champions, but so are our various schools and research centres, and even individuals. Each champions IS in its own way, but it is especially valuable when our organisations engage with policy makers and funding agencies. It is also critical that key individuals step up to the plate to take on key roles. Thankfully, ACPHIS and AAIS and key individuals within it (e.g. Deborah Bunker, Mark Toleman, John Lamp, and Julie Fisher to name but a few) have been very active in Australia in such things as influencing journal rankings, providing input to the ERA (Australia), and setting research agendas and priorities. I am confident that ongoing work on systems/technology for human benefit, e.g. Green IT, will find voice through our organisations and dedicated researchers in the public discourse as part of the ongoing evolution of the IS field.

Cheers,
John

From: aisworld-bounces at lists.aisnet.org<mailto:aisworld-bounces at lists.aisnet.org> [mailto:aisworld-bounces at lists.aisnet.org] On Behalf Of Guy Gable
Sent: Monday, 16 December 2013 6:37 AM
To: aisworld at lists.aisnet.org<mailto:aisworld at lists.aisnet.org>
Subject: [AISWorld] Who are the Champions of IS?

A COMMENT ON "AUSTRALASIAN CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION SYSTEMS" (ACIS) 4-6 DEC 2013, MELBOURNE ... Perhaps sensitized by my anticipation of the day-2 panel I was on 'Transforming the future with sensitivity to the past', I discerned a theme across several sessions I attended. Much enjoyed Rick Watson's opening keynote "Transforming Information Systems - A teleological shift" which, simply put, advocated increased relevance and societal value from our research; purpose driven research. I wasn't as convinced of the 4 dominant logics ... survival->production->customer service->sustainability ... and the argument that the IS developed during an ERA reflect its dominant logic (thus Rick's interest in energy informatics). I too felt that much of the work that Rick was advocating might be better undertaken by governments (e.g. carbon tax laws) and associations (e.g. standards), and venture capitalists, in cooperation with Universities. As I understood, Rick was advocating that IS morph radically into something completely different; I think IS at QUT already manifests many of the attributes of the 'new' IS discipline Rick was alluding to <http://mo.bf.rmit.edu.au/acis2013/ACIS2013_Watson.pdf>http://mo.bf.rmit.edu.au/acis2013/ACIS2013_Watson.pdf

Jon Venable's talk on 'Making Sense of the Growing IS Research Paradigm Milieu: a classification framework of IS research paradigms,' resonated with Rick's; a message being we should be clear about the values our research serves. I had some difficulty with Jon's hard separation of theorising-building-evaluating in Design Science.

Though I struggled with Diarmuid Pigott's talk (Murdoch U) 'Paying back borrowed meanings: the implications of the metaphor-driven history of IS research for its future,' which stretched my limited grasp of philosophy, he brought the audience along, convincing us of the power of our focal metaphors for good or bad.

The panel on day 2 was largely unplanned. Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic kicked-off with a thoughtful discussion on performativity 'the process by which semiotic expression (in language or a symbol system) produces results or real consequences in extra-semiotic reality, including the result of constructing reality itself' (Wikipedia). In other words, entirely consistent with Diarmuid's concern that we as a discipline are inadequately aware of the extent to which our concepts are self-fulfilling. Roger Clarke went next, with his session titled "What the Dickens is 'The Ghost of ChrIStmas Future'??" advocating the importance of histories and our roles as historians for the discipline. Roger's draft slides are (for now) at <http://www.rogerclarke.com/SOS/ISFP-1312.html>http://www.rogerclarke.com/SOS/ISFP-1312.html. With his colourful storytelling, Roger retained his title as 'Chief Historian' of the IS discipline in Australia. For more of Roger's unabashed insights, have a look at chp.2 in 'The Information Systems Academic Discipline in Australia' at ... <http://epress.anu.edu.au/titles/info_systems_aus_citation/pdf-download>http://epress.anu.edu.au/titles/info_systems_aus_citation/pdf-download . I went last, and given Doug Vogel's  introduction and Dubravka and Roger having gone over their allotted time, I truncated my presentation to leave a few minutes for discussion. Just as well, as mine was by intent, a comparatively dry account of past substantial efforts to document the IS discipline history in Australasia and Pacific Asia, advocating more of the same (slides from a talk I gave in 2007). Given the thought provoking prior presentations I felt compelled to also provoke thought, so suggested at the outset that none of what Dubravka or Roger had related mattered; that it doesn't matter what or how we research. Rather, what matters is governance of the discipline and power. I wasn't pulling this entirely out-of-the-air, as it was in some sense a cross-case conclusion from our Pacific Asia study of the discipline, though never amplified in print (special issue of CAIS Vol 21 (2007)). In truth, as the conference progressed, my belief in this interpretation strengthened; that what matters is the governance and power of the discipline; our Associations (ACPHIS, AAIS, AIS, ACS) our representation (e.g. with ACS, ARC), and our champions. Who are the future champions of IS in Australia?

Guy G. Gable  |  Professor & Academic Director Research Training, Information Systems School
Science and Engineering Faculty | Queensland University of Technology
Y-Block, Level 7, Room Y7-04, Gardens Point Campus  http://gggable.com/
mob +61(0)4 04096411 | mailto: g.gable at qut.edu.au<mailto:g.gable at qut.edu.au>           CRICOS No 00213J

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aisnet.org/pipermail/aisworld_lists.aisnet.org/attachments/20131223/be5b1f71/attachment.html>