Description:
About a year ago in an earlier column [Vazsonyi, Andrew. 1973. Information systems in management science. Interfaces 3 (3, May) 30–33.] I raised the issue of what steps to take in teaching information systems. Since then I have had many discussions both with colleagues in academia and in industry to assemble enough material for this column. I apologize to my contributors for not referencing them, but the material is so fragmentary and sometimes contradictory that attempting to present an integrated view makes it difficult to identify individual sources. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the educational situation in information systems is lack of consensus on what to do and wide disparity in status among schools. The relationship to computer science is also widely divergent. In some schools computer science includes information systems; in some there is a sharp conflict between the two fields; while others have no computer science groups at all, or there is no interaction.