Nurminen's Column on IRIS: Part 1

The First Years of IRIS IRIS is the name of the annual meeting of people involved with Information Systems Research in Scandinavia. It has been circulating among the four Scandinavian countries Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden now already 20 years. In August 1997 the IRIS Association was established. At the same meeting I was invited to give an opening address about the 20 years of IRIS history. For this presentation I collected and analysed quite a lot of material, and it seems that this material could also serve further interests than merely chronological curiosity. For example, it tells much about the Scandinavian School in Information Systems. Several persons in the audience came and told me that the ideas explored in the presentation ought to be made available in written form. The volume of such a work is too extensive to be published as an article and too narrow to justify a monograph. I therefore suggested that I could write a series of columns for the Scandinavian Journal. I also wanted to make a reservation, that each column should be reviewed by a few key persons of the period in question. The Journal accepted my offer, and here comes the first item. The history organises very naturally in periods of four years. This gives each of the four countries one event as the organiser. Thus the bias due to the organiser role is distributed evenly. The only exception of this rule is the first period, when all four events took place in Finland. This part covers the first four seminars from 1978 to 1981. But before we can proceed to the events themselves, we Nurminen’s Column on IRIS: Part 1