The IS Core-I: Economic and Systems Engineering Approaches to IS Identity

This article presents an economic basis for declaring Information Systems and Information Technology to be both cognitively and socio-politically legitimate and to show that learning [Benbasat and Zmud, 2003] has been achieved. The large scale complexity and diversity of today’s information systems are discussed within the context of a software engineering (SE) model and the higher-level view of the product that SE provides. The history and scope of investments in computing, and the practices of software engineering demonstrate that we are not a New Collective suffering from an identity crisis. We are a heterogeneous group looking at a wide diversity of Information Systems, some of which challenge the way we think about organizational boundaries and show that artifacts are not adequate to define IT.