Abstract
I wonder who first coined the phrase “information system”. At the time it probably seemed a very useful way of focusing thought on a particular type of system. Like all labels in language, it will have achieved common usage because it was useful. But perhaps we’ve now exploited it too much and in so doing manoeuvred ourselves into a semantic cul-de-sac. In this short paper I shall try to show that the phrase has a dangerously harmful effect in its current use and suggest how we might begin to overcome this.
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Paton, G. (1995). Information Systems. In: Ellis, K., Gregory, A., Mears-Young, B.R., Ragsdell, G. (eds) Critical Issues in Systems Theory and Practice. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9883-8_49
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9883-8_49
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