The foundations of IS can be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century rational-management stream of thought, associated with Fayol and Taylor. Although usually interpreted as being about efficiency in the use of physical resources through understanding of the ‘time and motion’ of agents, the movement is reinterpreted easily as also being about the use of information. Drucker (1968) included a large section on what he called ‘the knowledge economy’ (which would currently be referred to as ‘the information economy’). Drucker (1968:328) argued that ‘the idea that knowledge, systematically acquired, could be applied systematically to work is no more than 200 to 250 years old’, and first occurred in tool makers and tool designers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution.
Automated equipment—in particular, punched-card handling devices—were in use in large-scale applications at the very beginning of the twentieth century, in particular for the US census (for example, Kistermann 1991). The invention, articulation, application and rapid improvement of electro-mechanical and then electronic computers in the period 1935–50 is well documented (for example, Campbell-Kelly 2003; Norberg 2005). These initiatives were motivated by the processing of ephemeral data into significant results, rather than what we would now call data management. Technologies to provide permanent storage quickly came to be seen as an important adjunct to computation, and the complex of technologies needed to support what became computer-based IS quickly emerged.
The use of electronic computers for the processing of administrative data brought a substantial impetus to the emergence of the IS discipline. Applications of this kind began simultaneously in the United Kingdom and the United States in 1951, with Leo at the Lyons Tea Company, and Eckert and Mauchly’s Univac 1 at the US census (Caminer et al. 1998; Land 2000b; Johnson 2006). The first installation of a computer in a US company expressly for administrative purposes appears to have occurred only in 1954, for payroll at General Electric in Louisville, Kentucky (Mason 2005).
To extract a comprehensive history of the early years of business applications of computing, it is necessary to read beyond the substantial US literature on the subject. Many US publications subscribe to the myth that very little of consequence happened outside the United States, and they merely footnote German and particularly British work, even though it was vital from the 1930s into the 1960s. On the other hand, the tempo in the United States picked up very quickly, as banks and airlines recognised opportunities, and even more quickly after the emergence of computer architectures designed for business applications—particularly the IBM 360 series from 1964. From about 1960 onwards, US energy dominated innovation in information technology (IT) in Australia, as elsewhere.
The emergence of the IS discipline was in historical terms brisk, but to an observer at the time it would have appeared laboured and wayward. It appears to have followed somewhat different paths in various countries and regions, with distinct flavours discernible in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Scandinavia and Australia. The myopia of the author—and of English-language cultures generally—makes it likely that critical ideas from other countries have been overlooked, or inaccurately attributed.
Differences also occurred within countries, particularly those of substantial geographical size. The term ‘the tyranny of distance’ (coined by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey in his 1966 book of that name) might seem quaint to post-Internet generations, but it afflicted countries the size of Australia, Canada and the United States. During the early years of the IS discipline, with no coordinative mechanisms such as an information infrastructure any more sophisticated than the voice-only services over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and textual data over the telegraph and telex networks, and with no accreditation panels, no curriculum committees, no textbooks, few conferences and relatively high airfares, there was ample scope for strong, energetic and visionary individuals to have significant local, regional and national impact.
It was natural that the new interest in information would draw on existing disciplines and professions for which data and their processing were already an interest, and on emergent disciplines that were adopting new approaches made feasible by the new technology. The dominant strands appear to have been accounting and the emergent computer science, together with threads arising from a range of other sources. The following were of particular importance.
Organisation and methods (O&M), a branch of industrial engineering that applied a form of ‘rational management’ to organisations’ internal operations. This was influential particularly in the United Kingdom, and in some areas of Australia.
Operations management—although this was far less influential in Australia than it was in the United States.
Operations research, as it developed in the United Kingdom and the United States during World War II, and its applications in the business arena as management science and decision sciences. Particularly influential authors were Simon (1960) and Miller and Starr.
Management accounting—particularly Anthony (1965) and Prince (1966, 1970). Similarly traceable to Taylorism and industrial engineering, this approach focuses on applications of micro-economics that are useful within the organisation, measurement schemes to enable the discovery and analysis of exceptions and ways to manage measurements and communicate them to the managers who need them.
Systems thinking, which drew originally on von Bertalanffy and Boulding and the Society for General Systems Research in the United States from the mid-1950s onwards (Mason 2005), Emery, Churchman, Jay Forrester, and Katz and Kahn (1966); and in the United Kingdom von Bertalanffy in 1950, and later Peter Checkland. Closely related to this movement was cybernetics, as pioneered by Norbert Wiener, further developed by Ashby and applied by Stafford Beer. This focused on the feedback and control aspects of systems. There was much interest in these bodies of theory in Continental Europe as well, centred on the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) conferences in Schloss Laxenburg, south of Vienna. The emphases and patterns of development on the two sides of the Atlantic, and within Continental Europe, were rather different, and no history has been located to date that integrates them.
Socio-technical systems. This thread developed in the United Kingdom from the 1950s onwards—initially at the Tavistock Institute—and was adopted and extended particularly in Britain and Scandinavia. It represented a reaction against the reductionist thinking inherent in the previous strands, and resulted in (sophisticated) mechanistic designs: ‘If a technical system is created at the expense of a social system, the results obtained will be sub-optimal’ (Mumford 2006, attributed to the Tavistock Institute). The soft-systems school of thought followed. Publications that documented and consolidated this movement included Mumford and Banks (1967), Bjorn-Andersen (1980), Checkland (1981), Mumford (1983) and Wood-Harper et al. (1985).
Management theory placed expectations on the new and expensive technology. Drucker was particularly influential, as were Ackoff and Likert, and Macfarlan, and Scott Morton (1971) at the Harvard Business School. A range of what could be called ‘thinking manager’s gurus’ had substantial influence on DP/IS/IT managers, including EDP Analyzer (later I/S Analyzer), Dearden, Auerbach, Infotech ‘State-of-the-Art’ Reports and James Martin. Their impact on IS academics was less substantial, but Martin in particular provided syntheses of material that were much used as IS textbooks.
Beyond the intellectual sources were those dictated by pragmatism. The application of computers to administrative, commercial, industrial and government purposes required the development of software. The necessary rapid production of new software developers depended on the expression and structuring of know-how into what would now be called ‘codified knowledge’ about what came to be called analysis, design and programming. From 1967 until about the mid-1980s, this practical need had a substantial impact on the conception of the scope of the IS discipline. Since then, applications development has drifted away from the mainstream of IS—and IS from it. Programming has been reduced to an industrial skill, and design has become either the independent, cognate discipline of software engineering or a substantial component of the adjacent discipline of computer science—or both. It is unclear which discipline ‘owns’ analysis, if any. To many IS academics, the perspective typified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) is far too narrow and mechanical, with its reductionist conception of systems analysis as ‘requirements engineering’.
As the frame within which the remainder of this chapter is developed, some clustering of the themes and topics can be suggested, as follows.
Technology as enabler and driver, including computers, electronic data processing (EDP), applications, applications development, the software development life cycle (SDLC), the systems life cycle (SLC), computer usage, usability, technology adoption and impediments to adoption.
Organisations, as the primary context within which information systems are developed and operated, and for whose purposes they are applied, including organisational behaviour, requirements elicitation, business process analysis, usability, technology adoption and impediments to adoption.
Systems thinking, including O&M, GST and cybernetics leading from SDLC to SLC, socio-technical theory, soft-systems methods, incorporation of human factors, usability, adoption and merging with human behaviour and communications into semiotics and perhaps ontological foundations.
Business school thinking, including operations research (OR)/management systems (MS), management accounting, controls and auditing, management of DP/IS/IT/IC&T, information management, usability and adoption.
Data and information management, including database management systems (DBMS), data modelling, data dictionaries, information resource dictionary systems (IRDS) and, later, the absorption from librarianship of key concepts about meta-data.
It is stressed that this clustering is a clumsy classification, not a clean taxonomy. As evidenced by the appearance of such terms as ‘adoption’ in multiple clusters, there was continual cross-feeding and co-evolution of thinking. Particularly during the formative years, the process and the product were highly eclectic, as each local leader sought to make sense of the domain and contribute to progress.