The Value of Information Systems Teaching and Research in the Knowledge Society

Introduction Increasingly, businesses in developed nations are facing greater competitive pressure because efficient production is now the norm in many industries. Consequently, new ways of establishing comparative advantage are being sought. Increasingly, businesses are seeking to create competitive advantage by reconfiguring their activities so that they are better aligned with ever-changing market needs. This model of market competitiveness relies upon the rapid exploitation of business intelligence, which requires workers to possess information handling and decision making skills. The 'knowledge economy' is now regarded as the paradigm of economic progress. Moreover, it is envisaged that reforms to educational and social policies will create a 'knowledge society' conducive to such economic change. In the public sector, some governments are mandating the use of Internet technologies to achieve cost reductions. Effectively, the policy goal is to reduce the size and cost of existing bureaucracies by making them self-service. Although the focus is on efficiency, the societal implications are similar to those of the private sector: citizens will be disadvantaged if they lack information handling and decision making skills. Considering this broad socio-economic picture, the role of IS education in universities can be considered at three distinct levels: (a) citizen/society (Vinten, 2000); knowledge worker (Cardinali, 1998); and IS/knowledge expert (Doke and Williams, 1999). Whilst university education in IS may rightly focus on the third level, it must address the wider context, including the role of IS experts in educating/training knowledge workers and citizens, in solving their problems and satisfying their information needs. The increase in demand for 'knowledge skills' has created, and been influenced by, marked changes in educational requirements. Over the past few decades, this has led to the massification of higher education, which is providing a broader base of intellectual skills in most advanced economies. This not only affects higher education teaching but also has major implications for university research, in general, and IS research, in particular. As society becomes a mass of competent and discerning knowledge users, the user base for academic research broadens and its demands change. Other organisations also establish themselves as knowledge producers that complement or compete with universities. Governments concerned with economic performance have also maintained policies of encouraging universities to produce knowledge of clear economic value and to participate in its capitalisation (Etzkowitz et al., 2000). This paper argues that the role of IS teaching and research in universities needs to be reconsidered in the light of the complex of social, political and economic change outlined above. The kinds of knowledge being produced, the target stakeholders and the nature and extent of competition and collaboration between IS knowledge producers needs to be reevaluated. The radical changes in the societal role of the university must be appreciated and their implications for singular disciplines, such as information systems, understood. Section 2, therefore, provides a brief overview of the traditional role of the university and how this is changing as the knowledge society paradigm influences the direction of social and economic change. During this discussion, a number of stakeholder groups are identified. The needs and expectations of these stakeholders are considered in section 3 to provide a broad view of the requirements of the IS discipline. Using this analysis, the teaching and research roles of IS academics are considered in section 4 and some 'policy level' recommendations for the IS academic community are made. Section 5 concludes the paper by reflecting upon the implications of this analysis for the IS discipline's relationships with the identified stakeholder groups. …