The IS History Initiative: Looking Forward by Looking Back

Abstract

After officially appointing an AIS historian and forming the AIS history task force at the beginning of 2013, the AIS supported a set of systematic efforts, named IS history initiative, to preserve and represent the IS field's history. From the perspective of the first AIS historian, I provide some background for the IS history initiative. Then I outline a detailed strategic plan and current status of its implementation. Ultimately, the IS history initiative has three goals: (1) to collect, represent, and preserve the IS field's history; (2) to interpret, write, disseminate, and review the IS field's history; and (3) to discover/identify IS genealogy, roots, sources, and facets that deserve to be examined from a historical point of view. Correspondingly, the strategic plan contains three parts. Each part has several specific tasks, many of which were already completed at the time of this writing, and several are either in progress or are planned for future efforts. This paper overviews both current efforts and guiding future efforts related to preserving and representing IS history.

Shifting baselines in information systems research threaten our future relevance

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In 2013, the AIS appointed its first historian. The rationale was that the IS (or MIS) discipline, now with more than 50 years of history, would benefit from a collective effort to preserve and interpret its history with a view to strengthen and further its theoretical genealogy (Zhang, 2015). It is ironic that, co-existing with this view, we are beginning to find forthcoming from a number of IS scholars, research that suffers from three clear and present dangers: weak theoretical motivation from an IS perspective; lack of novel theoretical understanding of an IS problem or phenomenon; and atheoretical analysis that does not consider or fails to build on cumulative bases in IS.

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“…There is evidence that, fifty years on from the establishment of the first IS academic departments and research centres, IS research has reached a healthy level of theoretical consolidation and developed a strong core (Tarafdar & Davison, 2018;Zhang, 2015). It is equally indisputable that there are many pressing sociotechnical problems in organisations, society and the environment that heavily implicate IS and need our attention as scholars.…”