Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of computer science to management situations, which were called “problems” to be
solved thanks to informatics!
In the board of Management, Information Systems began to be the origin of new
problems that the classic Management theories did not seem to take into account
relevantly! How to teach persons IS? The MI S 2 movement claimed that it is possible
to teach IS without any know-how in informatics. As a consequence, a lot of persons
with such background were promoted as managers of IS developments in various
countries. Obviously, they were not skilled to take into account not only informatics
but also the subtle, complex differences and shifts between human activities and
computerized tasks and processes.
The gap is great and no bridge can be built to cross it!
2.2 Shift
As soon as Information Systems became a main component of the enterprises, there
was a shift from informatics oriented towards materialized objects - often called
products like computers - to informatics oriented towards dematerialized objects -
information. This shift has four main dimensions.
1. The first dimension concerns the quality of the result: in one side of the shift,
the quality concerns the product, its performance, its feasibility, its reliability; in
the other side of the shift the quality concerns the information, its accessibility,
its accuracy, its consistency, its usability, its use, its security, its transformation.
In one side there are technical aspects and generic usages to take into account
when in the other side there are actors whose activities are strongly dependent
on the quality of information. This shift is similar with the economic shift from
the economy oriented towards goods to the economy oriented towards services.
This shift does not destroy the first side oriented towards product. But, it builds
a new conceptual space upon it and therefore, it constitutes a new complex where
the first side can no more be considered per se, but only as a component of the
complex, which has to be strongly related with the second one.
To face this shift, two popular attitudes appear:
- A passive attitude : the shift does not introduce any fundamental modifi-
cation, any new knowledge, any new methods; the usual ones are always
relevant - and so, IS stays only a domain of computer applications; specialists
on management and informatics can continue to work as usual!
- An ethereal attitude : a new domain emerges with new business models and
new fruitful perspectives, but with still the same fundamental concepts: from
management perspective the IS does not have to take into account informatics
and from informatics perspective the IS does not have to take into account
management!
2 Management Information Systems.
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search