Does ‘Information Systems’ Need Systems?

Abstract

At the 3rd UKSS biannual International Conference at the University of Paisley it was argued that the systems epistemology could provide the intellectual basis of the emerging discipline of Information Systems (Stowell, 1993). As if to support this argument the largest stream of the ten streams that made up the 1993 conference was the Information Systems (IS) stream in which a variety of systems based ideas about IS were expressed. Since the 1993 conference the single most important concern for IS practitioners and academics alike has been their active attempts to get IS recognised as a domain of education in its own right (Jones, 1994). Their actions lift IS as a discipline out of a purely intellectual debate into the higher education funding arena. However, a potential change in’ status’ for IS has important ramifications. If IS is to be treated as a discipline, a ‘department of knowledge’, this will mean important ramifications in terms of funding, assessment, professional accreditation and the location of the subject domain into one of the accepted domains of academic pursuit. Some of the issues are relevant to Systems. This paper will address some of those issues and consider what effect the potential changes in IS might have upon Systems and what, if any, contribution systems might make to the developing IS field.