[AISWorld] Why top IS journals ignore research in one of the most valuable assets: Data Centers?

[Christopher M. Conway]

On 03/04/2016 18:40, mmora at securenym.net wrote:
> I am afraid that AIS is not helping too much. Our behavioral colleagues
> are welcome but AIS should be controlled by Engineering ICT people !
Hello mmora at securenym.net,

I must respectfully disagree. And will do so without the benefit of
anonymity.

I *am* an engineer. I spent twenty years running systems, programming
systems, and doing pretty much anything you can do with systems. I even
debugged hardware on occasion. I've probably written about 1.5 million
lines of code, mostly in C on UNIX systems, though I've programmed and
administered VMS, Windows, and other systems you've not heard of as
well. I personally wrote a system which was instrumental in alerting
airline pilots to wind shear hazards, which has saved provably hundreds
and probably thousands of lives. Even though I wrote that system in
1988, it is still in use and being improved to this day. I was on one of
the teams scattered around MIT that captured and analyzed the Morris
worm, so I've been aware and alert to security issues for quite some time.

I think I qualify as someone who is a domain expert in the technical
side, and can speak to the proper preparation of other technical domain
experts. My main problems in industry were the idiotic decisions made by
people who *thought* they knew everything necessary about the technology.

To answer your question "are we really preparing IT technical people
correctly?", the answer is an emphatic "that's the wrong question".

As I understand the discipline, IS is about the intersection of
technology (specifically computers) and business. It is an inherently
applied field, in which the social context is a key ingredient. Sure,
yes, have the "artifact". But the artifact is valueless for the field
without its social context.

Because of this interdisciplinary nature, IS departments CANNOT train
technical people. In order to be properly prepared technically, you need
a great deal of mathematical theory, an understanding of how the
hardware works, and a layer of computing theory on top of this. There's
field which does that: it's called "computer science". Being able to use
Excel or a point-and-click IDE or write a quick Visual Basic hack or
able to use SPSS or SAS or even R is NOT being a domain expert.

Engineering schools do a very good job of turning out good technical
people. That's their job. Learning that field is a full-time job, which
leaves no time for softer issues, but that's okay; the technical people
are supposed to be domain experts in how to make computers jump. They
rely on other people to tell them where they should jump to.

That's where IS comes in. Yes, some technical understanding is
necessary; but no one coming out with an IS degree will ever be a
technical domain expert. Any IS person that makes technical decisions
without the advice and consent of their technical domain experts should
be fired. What IS personnel are, rather, is the link in between the
technical and the business side-- the people who understand where
computers can be profitably deployed, and how to explain to the non-IS
business people why that's valuable, and how to explain to the technical
people what they want. They don't understand what makes a router good,
nor do they understand how to properly float a bond. For the former,
they talk to technical people; for the latter, finance people. But IS
people are the ones who understand that both are important, and how to
make those domain experts play nicely together.

I wouldn't mind seeing more technically-oriented articles in our
journals, but they're still going to need to give context. And I
*definitely* don't think that the people who are running things should
only be engineers. The engineers already have a place to live, in
computer science, and lots of nice journals and conferences where they
can publish their work. Crossing disciplines is useful. But wiping out
the social context in IS simply makes it an inferior copy of the
computer science and software engineering fields.

FWIW, I have some agreement. That's why I'm trying to focus more on
sysadmins and developers in my work. But, again, writing an article
about how anyone letting Microsoft products into the server room damages
the quality of the computing services provided may be true, but only
from a technical perspective. The social perspective is the only reason
you'll find Microsoft in any server room anywhere. That's an interesting
IS question. How to optimize the server is a computer science question.

My €0.02. It's almost certainly worth what you paid for it, which is
nothing.

Best regards,

Chris

-- 
Christopher M. Conway, Ph.D.
IÉSEG School of Management
Paris, France