The Hall of Awesomeness

My faculty is going through a movement.  Yes that kind of movement.  They are looking for ways to get rid of the information systems discipline. This got me thinking… how can we have business without systems?

borrowed from http://rfor.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/hal-400.jpg

The picture above is Hal – the AI from 2001 – A Apace Odyssey.  As a young (at heart) information systems lecturer, I have always felt marginal.  It was like the management and business people knew they needed us, but couldn’t see the point.  The IS (information systems) area has been in steady decline in most regional non-big city areas since about 2002 and indeed with the exception of a few big IS centres, it remains to be seen what the future of IS holds.  As for me, I may be found *coughs* “surplus to requirements”.  What a horrible HR phrase that is!  In short, I might be in line to “get the arse”.

To be “surplus” as I call it, means that you are no longer required, not needed.  Kaput.  I remember when Operations Research died and became IS (actually I don’t – it was relayed to me by retired people) in Australia, and I remember thinking about how I needed to escape the fringe ‘sub-disciplines’ of the business school.  Herein lies the core of my problem, systems are not sub-disciplines.  They are not even fringe, they are core and essentially to business strategy.  It took me a long time to realise that and herein is the issue: the IT enterprise does not have what it takes to make for good business strategy.  IT people generally are not exposed to management strategy until they become managers.   Programmers are not very good leaders… although I have met many that are. I digress.

The re-imagining process

When something fails or goes to the poop factory like IS has, the thing to think about is why?  Why has there been a steady decline?   My view is that people need it, but because technology has so masterfully woven into the discipline by academics they have accidently wedded the discipline to technology.  What a tragic mistake that was.  Why do that?  Technology changes, is superceded and moves on.  IS should be about themes, concepts and meaningful things that are useful in any application.  Not simply a subset of business or IT… but a set of concrete ideas that are useful in many areas.  And herein lies the problem: IS never formed a coherent body of thought outside of technology.   We got as far as the technology acceptance model – they we set up camp at MISQ and realised this is it, we have made it.  The problem?  Our discipline had promise, it had themes, now it’s a bad joke based on old concepts that have been stolen back by management scholars and IT people.  What I am saying here doesn’t even matter because I could argue about why the IS school is miles apart from IT.  I could.  But, if you don’t already understand what I am saying and it’s not obvious then we as scholars have failed.  Yes we have failed, just like e-commerce models from 1998, FAILED! So I have decided to re-imagine systems in my own world and think about what IS means to me.

IS is a core body of ideas centred around information and it’s purposeful use in a wholistic way.  It captures: systems thinking, information flow, data resources and most importantly how to solve problems for humans by humans with technology.   It’s about humanising IT (hat tip: Richard and Tristan).  It’s not software engineering, it’s not information technology, it’s not business process management.  IS, is simply put the human and social and technical systems and how they cohrently form to make wholes and why that is important.  Yes, IS is about people, activity and lastly technology and how the intertwine.   Now let’s throw that away, it’s dead.

What would we have if we could have anything?

Firstly, a set of ideas not tied to technology.  So we have to ditch the word ‘systems’.  It’s BS anyway, and too many people think systems = computers.  I no longer have the energy to point them to Senge, Churchman, Ackoff, Checkland, Mingers, Jackson and many MANY others to prove my point.  You win, it’s your word.   What about the idea of information?  No, this too is too commonly associated with computers.   The core idea is that people solving problems and acting in a strategic way (without the implications of studying strategy from the dominant finance point of view), thus it has an applied pragmatic focus.  The phrase ‘problem solving’ has been stolen by educators so we can’t even use that, people almost always bring up the staircase and that makes me violently ill.  No no –> we need a new concept.  Hmm.

I have it, let’s take the four core concepts and see what we can make:

1. Information flow

2. Systems Thinking

3. Human Activity

4. Problem Solving/Design/etc etc etc etc (probably should be IFSTHAPSEEE)

How about ‘ISHP’ (note: this is a working title perhaps SHIP?).  So that way we could borrow from arts, management, science technology and design science disciplines and NOT have to make it about technology. That way we could study how people form social groups and if they use technology great!  So scholars in this field (ISHP scholars) focus on how systems thinking impacts human activity problem solving and how that in turn impacts on the way information moves around an organisation.  THEN once we have established ISHP as a theoretical framework for analysising and synthesising human problems (not computer ones) and how they solve them we introduce technology as a byword.  That way, we are always relevant and always interesting because we have new and useful ideas all the time about stuff that matters.  You could tell a colleague, ‘ISHP’ do you want to look at how the global economic crisis emerged and what can be done?  Then talk to ISHPs… they know, they know it all, because they know how to synthesise information for forge new interactions with the world and they know how to make NEW knowledge that works.  Oh yeah, ISHP it’s the BOMB.

ISHP Faculty

We could have a faculty with social psychologists, next to education people, next to problem solving experts, next to HR people, next to mad scientists and designers!  Imagine what we could achieve if we put technology into the background and focused on themes.  We could create a transdisiplinary environment of scholars who create new concepts from their disciplines,  it would really work well.   ISHP is a discipline where we focus on key issues to do with people, places and things… from a strategic/systems level NOT from a granular.     In theory, we could not publish in each others journals informing people of new ideas and concepts around social groups, explaining emerging phenomena from a comprehensive ‘systems’ perspective.  We could leave the mining up to the management scholars, accountants, and like-minded disciplinarians.  I want a department where we can collaborate on each others projects to create new ‘meta’ knowledge without those disciplinary constraints.

ISHP the future?

I doubt that, but to survive IS needs to be reimagined.   It’s way too scrugged (a word meaning ‘shotgun’ approach to concepts – blast you in the face with a whole heap of stuff with no depth) at the moment.  Thoughts?

Recently I was handed what is probably the most disturbing news I have heard since someone I know died.  You are ‘surplus to requirements’.  Well, it’s not official yet … it may never be official.  You see, I am part of a Business School that has no place for Information Systems people anymore.  They have told us that they will be ‘discontinuing us’.  Shoving us off, moving us away and so forth.  Is it a crisis or an opportunity?  A failure or the seeds of success?  I can’t tell.  What I do know is that I am thinking dark thoughts and reflecting on what is to date twelve years of my life (two more if you include the year I did at TAFE and in the other university up the road) in the discipline of information systems.  IS is dead IS is DEAD LONG LIVE IS!

Instead of offering a scowl, which I am entitled, I felt I should reflect on the key thing that IS failed to do over the last decade.  It failed to be what other people wanted it to be.  It failed to present coherence because systems thinking is the search for comprehensiveness and complexity which the micro-managing dot finders in management schools are typically trying to find, is not coherent.  This causes this, they say, that causes that they say.  Bullshit, I cry, nevertheless it falls on the hardest of ears.  The sound of my own voice reverberates back to me, ‘We can’t just analyse, we need to ‘synthesise’ because drilling down only works sometimes (Hat tip: Dewey and Rorty).   Why do we need ‘systems’ anyway?  Why do we need ‘systems’ thinking?  What a steaming load, you say, that’s academery of the worst kind.  Looking for comprehensive, complex explainations of things, instead of simple cause and effect (WMD).  Honestly!

Instead of quoting an endless stream of scholars from Europe (Checkland, Ulrich, Jackson, Flood, Mingers, Stacey) and the United States (Ackoff, Churchman, Senge) I will say this: What a shame that Australia is still trying to be like everyone else and ignoring it’s own ecclectism.   In essence these things are now: surplus to requirements.  They don’t fit in the conception of business education anymore, even though I believe they should.  No doubt, we will see the next edition of Harvard Business Review or MIT Sloan waxing lyrical about ‘mobile technologies’ or ‘complex problem solving’ but they won’t be from my neck of the woods because it’s being chopped down!

In ending this short reflection, I am reminded of my own position in the university system and my right to express my feelings about it.  It’s failing.  Badly.  My parting shot is this:  You cannot have business without an understanding of systems, and you cannot have systems without an understanding of business.

I read Techdirt as do thousands of other people and recently they were discussing this ruling.  I am wondering about PR at a time like this when I too have become a victim of managerial-ness where I work (that’s another story).  I would have thought that even though people have strong opinions about downloading music and file sharing that surely it wouldn’t come to this.  What about testing the means?  What about sussing out a process by which to identify lost income?  The latter would support the premise that there is no lost revenue, no way no how.

I find my self agreeing with the post above about legal counsel.  Having watched an organisation I am involved with go through a legal battle of it’s own to take something that is rightfully theres, I have to say without a shadow of a doubt, it’s a long drawn out painful process.  In situations like these nobody wins.  It’s lose-lose.  The PR for the record industry falls through the floor and it does nothing to solve the mutual problem of connecting new fans who are accustomed to file sharing with newer ideas about the businesses.  Yet, in this we have to mindful that as Kuhn told us, when one paradigm shifts and moves, it has to recreate itself to emerge anew!

The record industry, for the sake of it’s own PR needs to find it’s innovation capacity.  Instead of suing everyone and hoping we will eventually retreat to the CD store to buy music again, they need to reframe this issues so the emerging users needs are met.  Otherwise, this situation will continue to plague us for years and it won’t be the last time we hear about such strange behaviour.  To me, the best answer it always a new interpretation, not the same old same old.  Do you have an opinion?