The Discipline of Information Systems : Issues and Challenges

This paper explores challenges of the evolution of the concept of Information Systems (IS) and its implications on IS as a discipline. The concept of IS has come a long way since the first ‘computer applications’ that automated routine, repetitive tasks, up until today’s organisation-wide IS, groupware systems and Internetbased IS that mediate communications. Gradually, IS have penetrated into all organisational processes and all aspects of organisational social life and inter-organisational relationships. As a result IS are coming to be considered as social systems, a component of the much wider domain of human language and social interaction. By addressing this dramatic shift from the first idea of the IS as a ’technical system’ to the idea of the IS as a ‘social system, technologically realised, the paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the emergence of the IS discipline.