Australians have always been acutely aware of the need to be in contact with the discipline elsewhere in the world, and have been active travellers since the late 1970s, as conference contributors, participants and program committee members, as doctoral candidates, as seminar speakers and in short-term visiting positions.

A small number of Australians have held positions overseas for extended periods, particularly in the United States, including Ted Stohr at New York University from the late 1970s, Iris Vessey at Pittsburgh, Penn State and Indiana from the late 1980s, Rick Watson at Georgia from the late 1980s, and more recently Peter Weill at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). (All were to a considerable extent Australian educated, and all except Vessey were born in Australia). The flow has been far from one way. Migrants and visitors have included Britons Philip Yetton (at the Australian Graduate School of Management from 1976, although active in IS only from 1993), Bob Galliers (1982–89 at the West Australian Institute of Technology/Curtin, and subsequently Dean of the Warwick Business School) and Janice Burn (1997–2005 at Edith Cowan University); Canadian Guy Gable (since 1995 at QUT); and American Michael Vitale (1995–2001 at Melbourne University and subsequently Dean of the Australian Graduate School of Management).

Australia has also attracted many visits from leading overseas IS academics. The 1984 and 1988 ACS/IFIP Conferences were an important stimulus. Some who have made multiple and/or lengthy visits include Frank Land (LSE, LBS), Bill Olle (London), Neils Bjørn-Andersen (Copenhagen), Leslie Willcocks (Warwick), Trevor Wood-Harper (Salford), Rudy Hirschheim (Houston), Doug Vogel (Arizona, later City University of Hong Kong), Felix Hampe (Koblenz) and Michael Schrefl and Gerald Quirchmaier (both of Linz).

Given that Australia represents about 0.3 per cent of the world’s population and about 1 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP), Australia tends to punch above its weight in many fields. For example, three of the 13 AIS presidents have been Australian born (Ron Weber, Richard Watson and Philip Ein-Dor). Although the impact of Australia’s approximately 700 IS academics has been noticeable, it has, however, been dwarfed by the energy of the United States. Appendix 2.3 provides an analysis in support of that conclusion.

One reason for this doubtless is the slow emergence of doctoral programs in Australia. Until the 1990s, most candidates had to either manage their own preparation with support from one or more supervisors but little formal preparatory study or leverage as best they could off relevant (and often not so relevant) units of study in adjacent disciplines. Even at the end of that decade, however, Metcalfe and Kiley (2000) found it necessary to argue for PhD course-work. Frank Land provided an important perspective—which confirms the author’s experience—that at least during the period to 1995, Australian PhDs in IS were generally expected to submit to examination by top-quality international figures. This might be explained by the high standards demanded of pioneers in an emergent discipline, or by the exquisitely Australian concept of ‘cultural cringe’—or more likely by a combination of both.

A range of institutions in Australia now offers more structured preparation for IS doctoral candidates. There might therefore be an expectation of some acceleration in Australians’ contributions in the most heavily weighted journals and the ICIS. That development might be confounded, however, by the continuing high productivity of American scholars, the higher productivity of journal publication by European scholars in recent years, the explosion in doctoral programs in other countries and the prevalent attitude that there are only about five top-level journals (despite the explosion in IS and IS-relevant journals in the past 15 years—565 currently, according to Lamp 2004—and the high quality of far more than a mere five of them).

The organisational location of IS staff has been highly varied from the outset. A large proportion of IS academics has always been in departments dominated by other disciplines, for which IS was, and in many cases still is, perceived to fulfil a service role. The dominant disciplines have been variously welcoming and hostile to the IS discipline and the staff working in it.

Almost all institutions had specialist organisational units focused on IS by the end of the 1980s. The last two of the major institutions to create them were regarded widely as being among the most conservative: the University of Melbourne (1995) and the University of Sydney (2001).

The statistical data in Table 2.2 were extracted from the various editions of the printed Directories of Australian Academics (Clarke 1988), Australasian Academics (Clarke 1991) and Asia Pacific Researchers (Gable and Clarke 1994, 1996), and the online directory as of 2 May 2005 and 22 March 2007. The entries in the printed directories were managed, whereas those in the online directory have been, and remain, self-reported and unaudited. There is known to be a substantial ‘staleness’ factor, with many individuals not amending their entries when they move, and particularly when they leave the discipline altogether. There is also clear under-reporting—for example, only 30 of the 52 identifiable professors had entries in March 2007. The data have been analysed notwithstanding such issues, because to some extent the inaccuracies cancel one another out, but primarily because (in what might be regarded as a parable of the relevance-versus-rigour debate) that is all that is available to analyse.

Note: The counts of individuals in 2005 and 2007 have been adjusted to remove PhD students and adjuncts, in order to sustain comparability with the earlier figures

Table 2.2 shows that, by 1988, when the first Directory of Information Systems Academics was produced, the 175 individuals who could be identified readily were in 55 separate departments in 41 educational institutions. Only nine of those 55 departments were recognisable as IS, with a further eight in computing or (electronic) data processing. In a pattern that has continued to the present day, 25 of the departments were dominated by business disciplines (six each of commerce, accounting and business; three each of management and economics; and one of administration); and computer science departments dominated the remainder, with some information science (in the technical rather than the librarianship sense) and mathematics. A significant difference from the patterns that are evident in the United States has been the relatively limited involvement of and interest in IS by Australian graduate schools of business, especially until about the mid-1990s.

The proportion of departments hosting IS staff that were named IS or similar grew steadily to nearly half, but plummeted after the end of the 1990s. This followed the ‘dotcom implosion’ about 2000 and the external financial pressures on universities, which have encouraged the imposition of departmental amalgamations in the hope that this will result in cost savings.

Analysis requires care. The count of individuals in 2005 included people who were no longer active in the IS discipline but whose entries had not been deleted. In early 2007, a purge of old records was undertaken, removing those that had not been updated since 2000 and where a message to the email address elicited no response, or a bounce message that indicated it no longer existed. This author (who was an editor of the directory from its establishment in 1988 until 1996) estimates that the 1996 figures over-counted by 10 per cent and under-counted by about the same amount, whereas, under the subsequent self-managed online scheme, over-reporting increased (until corrected in 2007) and the under-reporting increased as well (with no correction made as yet). Taking these factors into account, the contraction post-2000 would appear to have been 25–35 per cent. This is broadly consistent with anecdotal evidence and examination of a sample of institutions—although there was considerable variance among institutions in the timing and the scale of the contraction.

The approximately 400 people in the directory in 2007 under-reports the total count. If the under-reporting for all levels of staff is the same as that by professors, a factor of 52/30 or 1.73 needs to be applied, suggesting that in 2007 there were close to 700 people for whom IS was their dominant disciplinary affiliation, scattered across at least 85 departments (of which only 28 were distinctly IS or similar in name), in almost all institutions. This is broadly consistent with the finding in Pervan and Shanks (2006) of 460 staff in 24 respondent institutions of an estimated 36 (after allowing for probable over-sampling of the larger institutions). On the basis of directory entries in March 2007, the largest concentrations of IS academics appear to be at (in descending order) Melbourne, Monash, QUT, the University of South Australia, Edith Cowan, Deakin, Griffith and UNSW.

Pearcey wrote nearly two decades ago (1988:125) that ‘[t]he demand for people with computing expertise has always outstripped the capacity of the tertiary sector to supply it, and the situation seems unlikely to change’. Based on personal experience, that was the case for at least three decades, from the late 1960s until the end of the 1990s. About 2000, several factors conspired to dramatically reduce demand. The burst of the dotcom bubble about 2000 undermined the attractiveness of all IT-related courses. In addition, offshore outsourcing had been extending progressively from data capture to programming and even detailed design work. The commoditisation of many skills has also resulted in transfer from the university sector to the vocational education and training (VET) sector.

The publicity accompanying this large market correction was followed by substantial reductions in enrolments from domestic students—although it appears to have had a smaller impact on foreign fee-paying numbers. As is the way with ‘the invisible hand’ so beloved of economists, it appears likely that the slump will have been an over-correction, and that there will soon be shortages in graduates and in IS staff.

Few members of the IS discipline would regard it as being intellectually remote and abstract. On the contrary, it is generally regarded as a professional discipline. One indicator of this is the fact that major contributions to the foundations of IS by Ron Weber and Canadian colleague Yair Wand (for example, Weber 1997) have been admired widely, but also ignored widely.

A professional discipline needs to be clear about who the professionals are whom the discipline needs to educate, interact with and conduct research for. The nature of the profession has, however, changed considerably over the years. It began with strong scientific credentials in the 1960s, but many of the people who surged into the field in the 1970s and even more so in the 1980s had no degree in a relevant discipline. The endeavours of the ACS to ensure appropriate preparation for careers in IS have been only partly successful, not least because of the rapid technology-driven changes in work patterns, business needs and IT management fashions.

Professional job titles and job definitions have changed a great deal in the four decades that the profession and discipline have existed. The original roles were computer operator (now largely defunct), systems analyst (now more commonly called business analyst), systems designer (often referred to as systems analyst/designer, and sometimes business process engineer, but diminished due to the contemporary dominance of packaged software) and programmer. The senior staff member was once called an electronic or automatic data-processing (EDP or ADP or just DP) manager. The executive to whom that manager reported was most commonly the finance director.

Chief technology officers (CTOs) and CIOs emerged at executive level only from the mid to late 1980s onwards, as the strategic significance of IT grew—and as the amount of money spent on it sky-rocketted. CIOs, who should be a natural connection point for senior IS academics into the world of business and government, commonly have no qualifications in IS, but rather are generalised executives thrust into a particularly challenging role.

Because graduates from IS courses are intended to move into the profession, the professional body, the ACS, has long run an accreditation program. Most institutions have felt the need to have their computing courses accredited by the ACS—as a form of review and as a means whereby graduates can be assured of qualifying for membership of the relevant professional body. For many years, the ACS’s accreditation guidelines mentioned the term ‘information systems’, but were oriented heavily towards computing and were dominated by computer science thinking (ACS 1985, 1987). Through the 1980s, many IS courses achieved accreditation only through the exercise of the discretion that the guidelines permitted the assessors. A mature IS discipline and profession needed more than this.

In 1989, this author and Bruce Lo proposed that the accreditation requirements for IS be distinguished from those of computer science, and that they reflect technology and business needs (Clarke and Lo 1989). The proposal was adopted in ACS (1990), and retained in Maynard and Underwood (1996). Underwood (1997) provides a more detailed description of the ‘core body of knowledge for IT professionals’, and reflects the computer science and IS perspectives on the domain.

The tension between the technology driver and the organisational aspect was exemplified by the competition between the ACS and the Australian Institute of Systems Analysts (AISA) during the 1970s. In this case, the computing end of the spectrum won by a very wide margin. The AISA, despite its organisational orientation, never grew into an association with significant membership or influence. Nor did any of the larger business-oriented professional associations ever make a significant move to capture the business-analysis profession. Despite this, membership of the ACS has remained fairly steady in the past several decades (between 12 000 and 16 000), reflecting a reduction in the proportion of people active in the field who are members.

Influence by the IS discipline on the ACS has been muted. For example, the presidency has been held by people outside IS for only six of the society’s 40 years. For 32 of the 40 years, the president has been a senior IS professional (Ashley Goldsworthy’s five years preceding the period he spent in academia). For a total of only two years has a member of the IS discipline been president (Alan Underwood, in 1990–91).

The IS discipline needs linkages broader than the IS profession, reaching out to other business functions and to executive levels of business and government. One form of linkage has been course and departmental advisory committees, which facilitate input from industry to the discipline. Information systems departments have also tended to draw heavily on people within industry for sessional tutors, sessional lecturers, guest lecturers and sometimes for adjunct appointments. In interview, Gerry Maynard mentioned the use by Caulfield Institute of ‘pleasant Friday afternoons’, which were used as a means of drawing DP managers in industry and government into contact with staff and students. A primary motivation for employers was the attraction of good graduates, whereas educational institutions stood to gain funding support and intellectual interaction.

The Australian Computer Users Association (ACUA) operated from 1968 onwards. Although it was a potential linkage point for senior academics, it does not appear that it was much used in that manner. UNSW ran a very successful IS forum from 1977 onwards, which drew in senior executives from industry and government. This was much easier than for many other institutions because Cyril Brookes had moved into academia from what was arguably the top private-sector computing position in Australia: Manager, Corporate Data Processing, for what was then the country’s largest company, BHP. Only a small number of IS departments appear to have been able to build and sustain linkages of this nature, primarily those in the more prestigious graduate schools of management.

The ACS/IFIP TC8 Conferences in Sydney in April 1984 and March 1988, organised by UNSW’s Brookes and Ross Jeffery and the senior IS professional and ACS officer Ann Moffatt, had the express purpose of establishing a bridge between industry and academia. That team’s success with industry linkage was reflected in the Institute of Information Technology, run at UNSW for IBM from 1987 to 1992.

During the 1980s, there was considerable emphasis among employers on ‘sandwich courses’, and flagship degrees were very successful at UNSW and UTS in Sydney, and at Monash and Swinburne in Melbourne. The perception in industry was that, particularly at the more applied end of computer science and the technical end of IS, quality graduates were being confronted by real-world problems too late. Sandwich courses provided students with early exposure to the work environment, enabled theory to be leavened with practice and created the possibility that practice could leverage off theory.

Course-work was originally entirely the responsibility of academics. There has been a drift in recent years towards outsourcing, as resource pressures in universities increase. A larger proportion of units of study appear to be being taught directly from textbooks, chapter by chapter, with less bespoke design to fit local needs. In addition, industry-provided product-specific units have come to be accepted for credit within some universities (for example, networking by Cisco and .NET development by Microsoft). The eternal relevance-versus-rigour tussle in research is mirrored by the training-versus-education battle in the learning context.

For an extended period, there was competition for dominance in the IS discipline between computer science on the one hand and business, commerce or accounting on the other. Dreyfus (2004) chronicles the establishment of the last IS department, at the University of Melbourne, which occurred during the period 1994–96. The Vice-Chancellor, David Penington, requested a report from a committee chaired by Peter Weill (who was an IT management professor in the Graduate School of Management). The Weill report stressed that there was no one standard structure for IS across the universities, with some courses management oriented, while others were highly technical. Penington opted to put the new IS department in the science faculty, at least for the short term, although housed close to computer science. The IS degree was to have five major themes: information systems, organisations, IT, analytical skills and personal competency. Later-year specialisation was to be in one of three streams: organisations, IT or custom (Dreyfus 2004:1–6). As it has transpired, the department quickly developed a sufficient scale and power base, and more than a decade later its faculty location remains unchanged.

A comparison between the experiences of the Australian IS and computer science disciplines is instructive. In 1990, the numbers of academic staff in IS and computer science were comparable; however, whereas computer science staff were concentrated in departments bearing that or a similar name, IS staff were distributed through many departments, in many cases without a senior academic post allocated to the IS discipline. The diffusion of IS staff has meant that for many years IS has lacked political clout, and even now has less political clout than other disciplines with similar total numbers. Computer science, for example, has demanded and attracted far greater funding and support staff, and it has always been far more influential and better recognised than IS.

One implication of the lack of political power has been a lack of resources for educational functions. In most institutions, there was a long-term struggle to gain sufficient funding and staff positions (and then to find people with appropriate education and experience to fill them). In some contexts, the computer science discipline was powerful and resisted the emergence of IS. In others, economics and management disciplines did the same. The joint majors and double degrees that the market needed emerged very slowly, and the silo effects of faculties, schools and even departments resulted in students often having to devise ways to construct programs that suited their interests, and their perceptions of current needs.

Another problem has been the serious difficulty of acquiring sufficient resources to support research programs, or even individual projects of significant scale. Members of the discipline in Australia were under-trained in research, they were highly diverse in their orientations, domains of study and research techniques, and they were scattered geographically. The development of consortia to develop quality bids was difficult, and remained so well into the era of widespread e-mail that began with the launch of AARNet in mid-1989 (Clarke 2004).

The primary source of funding, the Australian Research Grants Scheme (ARGS), later the Australian Research Council (ARC), created a sub-topic of IS only in the late 1990s. Until then, those few who were successful in their bids submitted under either computer science or management headings, and were generally assessed by academics with no affinity with the IS discipline.

Since 1998, IS has been recognised within the ARC RFCD Code as one of 139 disciplines and 898 subjects. The 17 most directly relevant subjects are listed in Table 2.3. The first 13 are in the discipline of IS, within the information, computing and communication sciences cluster, and the other four are applications within particular disciplinary areas, including business. It appears, however, that a revision of the RFCD Code could be placing these IS-specific classifications under threat.

In 2001, after lobbying by ACPHIS and the then new AAIS, the IS discipline gained a member of the ARC’s College of Experts. Panel members from the IS community since then have been Janice Burn (Edith Cowan), 2001–03, Graeme Shanks (Monash), 2004–05, and Michael Rosemann (QUT), 2006–07.