TC 8 Information Systems
Interview with Dewald Roode, TC 8 Chair (2002 2004)
Dewald Roode holds a masters degree in theoretical physics and a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Potchefstroom in South Africa. He obtained a PhD at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in 1968.
His first position was as a scientist at the South African Atomic Energy Board, where he was responsible for scientific programming. In 1971 he was appointed as professor in the newly formed Department of Computer Science at Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg.
In 1979 he left the University to take up a position with Sperry UNIVAC. In 1981 he was appointed as the first Executive Director of the Computer Users Council of South Africa, where he was responsible for the development and implementation of the first national standards for education and training for the South African Computer Industry. In 1983 he founded, with two colleagues, a Management Advisory firm.
In 1988 Dewald decided to return to academic work while retaining a firm footing in consultancy, and accepted a position as Head of the new Department of Informatics at the University of Pretoria. He consolidated his business interests in a new information management consultancy firm, of which he was and still is the owner. In 1995 he was appointed Director: Information Technology at the University of Pretoria, but continued to act as Head of the Department of Informatics. In 1998 he was appointed as the first Director of the new School of Information Technology at the University a position he retained until his early retirement at the end of 2001. Currently he retains a busy business schedule and continues to supervise a number of doctoral students as extraordinary professor at the University of Pretoria.
The Delivery Co: In your opinion, which are the most significant developments and activities of your TC since its foundation?
D. Roode: Information Systems suffered for a long time under the name of Data Processing, specifically in organizational context. Even the more elevated "Management Information Systems" had a very narrow focus, and it is no wonder that as recently as 1989, Banville and Landry could still ask, in a celebrated article in the Communications of the ACM, "Can the field of MIS be disciplined?". While Computer Science had almost instant "disciplinary" status (the same issue of CACM had an article by Peter Denning and others on "Computing as a discipline"), IS in many cases is still regarded as merely the application part of the more respected CS. TC 8 has made an enormous contribution towards establishing the field as a discipline, even though we still humbly speak of the "emergence of the discipline of Information Systems". Through the wide spectrum of activities of TC 8 it has become abundantly and undeniably clear that we have, in IS, much more than merely the application of another discipline which will develop the algorithms and procedures that IS practitioners will gladly implement.
In the absence of a solid mathematical grounding, which Computer Science readily had, IS academics and practitioners initially strived to achieve recognition by almost blindly following a positivistic research approach. Until the mid eighties, almost all recognized research was done in the positivistic tradition, and while certain problems surely could, and should, be researched in this way, other problems cried out for a non-positivistic approach. The "battle" of the positivists and the non-positivists was largely over in the mid-eighties, and it is now commonly accepted that respectable research can be done in a non-positivistic manner. The richness of approaches that this has opened to IS researchers has led to a blossoming of the field and TC 8 has been, I think, instrumental in this achievement. Of course, this is not meant to take anything away from the individuals who were and still are the intellectual leaders of this revival. But I think that TC 8 played an important part.
The Delivery Co: Are there any current technical activities within the scope of your TC which you feel could have a significant societal/economic impact in future?
D. Roode: The scope of TC 8 covers all aspects related to information systems to support and coordinate organizational activities. In spite of the recent floundering of dot com companies, and a world-wide slump in IT, it remains a fact that the world, and specifically the organizational world, is becoming more and more dependent on IT and Information Systems. In such a business climate it is to be expected that suppliers will always come forward with new solutions to existing problems (and will sometimes even create new problems for which they have the solutions!) that promise to once and for all solve an organization's headaches. This is simply the way a free market operates. It is our duty to shed light on and work towards greater understanding of the inherent complexity of information systems in organizational context. More importantly, this understanding should diffuse into the organizational world, and should not remain encapsulated in academic circles. It follows that our Working Group activities should actively focus on bringing academics and practitioners together. As part of our marketing strategy, TC 8 is investigating ways and means of giving effect to this. Our aim is to be recognized as the internationally accepted authoritative source on issues related to information systems in organizations. Rather than following, we should be leading. In other words, instead of (in general) analyzing and studying the latest solutions provided by suppliers, our work should be so important and accepted as authoritative, that suppliers would be implementing solutions developed by us. This almost requires a mindset change, but if we could achieve this, our contribution would have enormous impact. A pre-requisite is, I think, a closer liaison with suppliers than we currently maintain.
The Delivery Co: Are there any specific technical issues you find important for IFIP as a whole to address?
D. Roode: One of the aims stated by IFIP in its generic aims for Technical Committees, is "to have special regard for the needs of developing countries and to seek practical ways of working with them". Being from a developing country myself, I wholeheartedly support this aim. The World Information Technology Forum (WITFOR) that IFIP has launched and that will, for the first time, be held in 2003 in Vilnius, Lithuania in this regard will make an important contribution. It is planned to have a WITFOR every second year in a developing country, and being on the Steering Committee of the first WITFOR, I can say that we have high expectations of the difference this could make to promoting the use of ICT in the developing world. The "Vilnius Declaration", which will be issued at the conclusion of WITFOR 2003, will, amongst other things, advise governments of emerging nations on strategies for the use of ICT and could be one of the most important contributions ever to come from IFIP.