Critical professional education about information and communications technologies and social life

Looking back over the 1990s, it is easy to see the widespread troubles of many ventures that depended upon advanced IT applications, including business process re-engineering projects, enterprise systems, knowledge management projects, online distance education courses, and, famously, some of the dot-com businesses. These “troubles” vary from substantial underperformance (i.e. projects that were much more costly and/or produced much less social or business value than most of the participating IT professionals anticipated) and many outright failures. Many of these “troubles” could have been avoided (or at least ameliorated) if the participating IT professionals had much more reliable and critical understanding of the relationships between IT conŽ gurations, socio-technical interventions, social behavior of other participants in different roles, and the dynamics of organizational and social change. Social informatics is the name of the Ž eld that studies and theorizes this topic, and is discussed in more detail in this paper. The key issue addressed in this paper is who will produce social informatics research for IT professionals, and where will they learn about important Ž ndings, theories, design approaches, etc.? The paper examines the record of computer science in the US as a major contributor to the relevant research and teaching. It also examines the possibilities for new kinds of academic programs ± sometimes called “information schools” and “IT schools” ± that are being developed to expand beyond the self-imposed boundaries of computer science and to integrate some organizational and social research as sites for social informatics. Introduction In the 1990s, the author argued that IT professionals (and especially computer science students) were inadequately educated for the roles they often played in conceiving, developing and supporting new applications of information and communications technologies (IT) (Kling, 1993, 1996). In particular, they did not learn empirically anchored analytical approaches to understand the relationships between IT applications and human life in organizations and the larger society. The author does not believe that his argument was particularly in uential. The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0959-3845.htm This paper is based on an earlier version (Kling, 2002) that was invited for the IFIP World Computer Congress 2002 (Montreal, August, http://local.cips.ca/info2002/). It was strengthened by comments from J.P. Allen, Bill Aspray, Blaise Cronin, Hamid Ekbia, Javed Mostafa, Howard Rosenbaum, and Steve Sawyer. ITP 16,4