Why IS/IT Professionals Must Be Renaissance Thinkers

Introduction: Beyond the Techie Geek Stereotype

Once upon a time, Information Science and Information Technology were thought of as enclosed, rarified disciplines — the provenance only of the technically astute. IS and IT personnel were usually relegated to their own specific areas of most organizational hierarchies. Specialists in IS/IT practice were sometimes known as mere "techie geeks," possessing necessary and specific skills but ones with little application outside the field. This was partly because the educations of IS/IT personnel, fairly or unfairly, were assumed to consist of matters specific only to technology, rather than comprising any aspect of the humanities, social and natural sciences, or even the more theoretical aspects of technology such as Artificial Intelligence.

However, the greater ubiquity of technology in business and academic organizations means that the educations of IS/IT staff — and thus IS/IT practice itself — must be more holistic. Technical development staff must be informed of the needs and paradigms present in other areas of study, including the social and natural sciences and humanities. Moreover, technology is always human-generated, and systems design can therefore benefit from the input of other disciplines as to how humans think. As the management theorist Schon observed, "We must, in other words, become adept at learning. We must become able not only to transform our institutions in response to changing situations and requirements; we must invent and develop institutions which are 'learning systems' — that is to say, systems capable of bringing about their own continuing transformation through innovation" (Schon, cited in Smith, 2001). When discussing organizational theories of learning, Schon might also have been describing the currently evolving professions in Information Systems and Information Technologies: as the needs of organizations evolve in their technical requirements, so must the professions that serve those organizations.

Behavioral Sciences and Human Cognition in IS/IT

In the behavioral sciences, individual and organizational psychology can give technical staff insight into how human beings function in a business context and how this might affect employee use of evolving computer systems. Studies of the human mind can help answer questions about how individuals learn a new application system, and about the relationship of the individual to the other workers in the group who use the same system. Sociology can help inform a designer about how groups respond to technical innovations. Anthropology, by taking a wider focus on group behavior in a world context, can provide insight into how technical innovations such as the Internet have changed the way human beings do business and relate to one another, both within organizations and around the world.

Thus, psychology can be just as necessary for an IT/IS professional to understand as the in-depth study of algorithms, data structures, and data abstraction. A knowledge of binary trees, recursive data structures, and dynamically allocated structures does not substitute for a knowledge of organizational hierarchies and personal structures of cognition. This is not to discount quantitative knowledge and the mathematical study of human behavior. While humans make decisions because of individual variance, it is still possible to make mathematical calculations about behavior by assigning probabilities to various factors and numerical consequences to outcomes. On a basic human level, "customer relationships are a key aspect of retaining existing customers and winning new ones. The management of the sales process has and always will be a key success factor. Customer relationships and the need to develop them existed before computer systems" (Thacker, 2000). Consumer or employee behavior, although it may be subjective or even irrational in its basis, can be measured and studied, and the insights deployed to increase sales figures, for example.

Language, Communication, and Information Theory

Decisions and information theory often attempt to bridge the gap between relying on qualitative descriptions of human behavior and drawing mathematical conclusions about that behavior. Information theory is often described as communication theory combined with mathematical theory, outlining the engineering requirements of communication systems and the limitations of such systems. In other words, human language and computer languages only have words that operate in a context. It is entirely possible, when designing a program, for a string of nonsense words and a meaningful sentence to be equivalent with respect to information content. In a meeting, a simple gesture or a single word can convey far more than the word alone.

This is important to remember both when designing a program and when conveying the applications of that program in a way that is not simply correct, but understandable and memorable — because both computer and human organizations deal with language that is context-dependent. Organizational theory additionally notes that every organization is a kind of living entity in and of itself, where employees may behave differently in a group context than they would alone.

Conclusion: The IS/IT Renaissance Professional

An IT/IS professional is anything but a "techie geek" — he or she must be supremely adaptable, as technology becomes a crucial part of all elements of the workplace and all workers at many levels of ability must use technology. Even when the professional is engaged in measurement — such as assessing the productivity gains from different applications and workflows — the entities being studied must be understood as human entities, rather than merely theoretical actors. This is not to discount mathematical analysis in systems design and decision-making, but merely to add that being a Renaissance student of different motivations and disciplines gives such analysis added weight and veracity.

Works Cited

Smith, Mark. "The Learning Organization and Knowledge Economy." The Learning Organization, 11 Jul. 2001, last updated 11 May 2004. Retrieved 21 Jan. 2005 from http://www.infed.org/biblio/learning_organization.htm

Thacker, S.M. "Customer Relationship Management." 2000. Retrieved 21 Jan. 2005 from