Training Information Systems Professionals to Balance at the Edge of Chaos in a Technical World

Balancing traditional information systems tertiary education curriculum with creative, intuitive, and process-based learning is the challenge we face as tertiary educators in equipping information systems professionals of the 21 century with the knowledge, skills, and understanding required to manage at the edge of chaos. Merry (1995) suggests that as well as the knowledge, which is out-dated fast in times of accelerated change, the ability to manage self-organized systems that change spontaneously to meet the ever-changing is required. Merry also suggests that we can borrow ideas from chaos theory and apply them to human activity systems and, if periods of chaos in human systems have within them some hidden pattern of behavior of the total system, then we may find ways to uncover the pattern and thus be better able to deal with the situation. Balancing at the edge of chaos requires stability, flexibility, and personal mastery in order to handle the turmoil that occurs in dynamic, everchanging systems, for it is at the edge of chaos where there is the widest range of behaviors from which to choose. Strategic information systems in organizations will need to be self-organizing. Educating students to accept the evolutionary nature of information systems design is paramount.