An Information Systems Perspective

1. An Information SystemsPerspective Tony Cornford

2. Information Systems • Study of information and communication technologies within organisational contexts and as part of a process of organizational change: some planned, some opportunistic, some emergent • planning and improvisation; • radical change and reinforced routine; • from above and from below; • from the centre and from the periphery

3. Accounting for technology • Capacities of technology are are products of social antecedents involved in their production and which sustain them • Linking technologies and their ‘construction’ to diverse ambitions, interests and social forces – why we get the technologies we get • Recognising their newness – technology as an ambiguous alien – and how we respond; resistance, hostility/hospitality, domestication • Explore the role assigned and/or adopted – automate, ‘informate’,’’’transformate’’’

4. What can we do? • Serve activities of design, implementation and evaluation, but recognising their limits • Support a sociotechnical perspective that encompasses hybrids (compounds or solutions?) of technical and human actors • Present the social/organisational effects of technology (search for cause), but also accounts of what a technology represents and becomes (consequence) – the technology in practice • Give some credence to the things we say in the margins