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The University of San Francisco

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2003

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Full-Text Articles in Business

The Is Core - Xi: Sorting Out Issues About The Core, Scope, And Identity Of The Is Field, Steven Alter Jan 2003

The Is Core - Xi: Sorting Out Issues About The Core, Scope, And Identity Of The Is Field, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Debates about the core and the scope of the IS field and about whether the core and scope are related to a crisis in the field have smoldered for many years. This article is a response to ten articles submitted by members of the CAIS Editorial Board who accepted an invitation to contribute to a debate about the core and scope of the IS field. Those articles were written as responses to Benbasat and Zmud’s [2003] article “The Identity Crisis Within the IS Discipline: Defining and Communicating the Discipline’s Core Properties” and my rebuttal [Alter 2003b] entitled “Sidestepping the IT …


Sidestepping The It Artifact, Scrapping The Is Silo, And Laying Claim To 'Systems In Organizations, Steven Alter Jan 2003

Sidestepping The It Artifact, Scrapping The Is Silo, And Laying Claim To 'Systems In Organizations, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

The “IT artifact” and debates about the core of the IS field received a lot of attention in the last several years. This paper is a response to Benbasat and Zmud’s June 2003 MISQ paper “The Identity Crisis within the IS Discipline: Defining and Communicating the Discipline’s Core Properties,” which argues that “the IT artifact and its immediate nomological net”1 constitutes “a natural ensemble of entities, structures, and processes” that “serves to bind together the IS subdisciplines and to communicate the distinctive nature of the IS discipline.” This paper starts by examining the meaning of “IT artifact” and concluding that …