Managing Information Systems Textbooks: Assessing their Orientation toward Potential General Managers
InSITE 2009
• Volume 9
• 2009
This paper is an assessment of the topical coverage of current Managing Information Systems (MIS) textbooks. The MIS course is normally required of all undergraduate and graduate business majors , and therefore is their primary education in the use of IS/IT in the modern technology-oriented organization. However, the MIS textbooks researched do not attempt IS/IT management fluency. They do not even fully answer the questions normally asked by management and users during the justification and implementation of modern technology-oriented enterprise applications. The primary author has been teaching IS/IT courses for IS professionals and for users and managers for almost fifty tears. What has changed since that time? Not as much as should have happened in the education of line and staff personnel who work in organizations with critically important IS/IT enterprise applications. Early courses for users and managers were remarkably similar to our current MIS courses. This paper, therefore, suggests a significant change in content of MIS texts from primarily encompassing technology sections covering personal productivity applications, systems development methods, and infrastructure to presenting much more detail on user and management topics including modern enterprise level applications (e.g. transaction processing systems), privacy and security, feasibility studies, and the justification of IS/IT systems.
MIS textbooks, enterprise information systems, operational information systems, transaction processing systems, justification of IS/IT systems