Business Information Systems

Did you ever listen to your father or mother talk about their jobs? If you did, you might have noticed that the world of work has changed – and IT is at the centre of it. A few examples:

• there are a lot more computers now than even 20 years ago. Why?
• many more employees suffer from back problems. Why?
• if you don’t want to, you hardly have to leave your house anymore. How?

The director Luc Besson, himself not averse to technology, said:

“Just because someone knows how to fire up his computer and can write an email does not mean that he did his job.“

Do you know what a “Luddite” is? Do you think Besson is a Luddite?

Few diagrams illustrate the changes during the 20th century better than the decrease of blue collar work, the increase of white collar work and the dramatic decrease of the people working in the farming industry of the USA below – involving the destruction of the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of farming families. Of course, this was not only the “doing” of information systems – but without modern IS infrastructure and IT, it would not be possible for a handful of large agricultural conglomerates to do the work of an army of manual laborers, organise trade and logistics of a major industry sector.

To read more about these and other developments (not from a technological vantage point), I recommend the books – especially the novels – of the US writer Gore Vidal.