Individual information systems as a research arena

European Journal of Information Systems (2011) 20, 251–254. doi:10.1057/ejis.2011.8; published online 22 March 2011 Evolution is what happens when you are not watching. An example is the personal computer. Computing for many individual persons has evolved from the ‘standalone desktop PC’ to a ‘networked PC’ to a ‘network of a PC and a laptop’ to a ‘network of PCs, laptops, printers, smartphones, etc’. This single processor has evolved into a complex ‘individual information system’ architecture just beneath the noses of information systems (IS) researchers. But are such small scale systems and architectures a topic worthy of IS research? Without a doubt, IS are evolving, and evolving rapidly. We often use technology as a substitute for the major evolutionary indicators in IS. In many places, ‘Computing’ has evolved to ‘Information Technology (IT)’, which has in turn evolved to ‘Information and Communications Technology (ICT)’. The exponential rise of available computing power is well recognized. This rise is frequently emphasized the comparable computing power of today’s small devices, which will inevitably have faster and more powerful processors, more memory, more storage, more sophisticated applications, and more communications bandwidth, than the large computer rooms of earlier times. Such rooms were physically large, and included ‘large’ mainframes, ‘large’ minicomputers, etc. From an IS perspective, it was perhaps more important that these computer rooms had a ‘large’ staff. For such a facility, there would have been a staff of more than 20 operators, systems programmers, application programmers, systems analysts, engineers, and managers. This facility would have been the information heart of a substantial centralized organizational IS. This kind of organizational computing and data communications power has grown, but it has also migrated down to fewer and fewer staff. It is the changing organizational size that should be of equal interest in IS to the changing ICT power. While such computer power has shrunk to a single small device, like a smartphone or a laptop, the staff size has dwindled to a single individual, who manages this ICT power part-time and with relatively little training. As time has passed, the relative levels of ICT power have migrated to medium sized organizations and further to smaller organizations and further still to a single individual. The research discipline of IS kept up well as long as there was an organization at hand. There are many studies of small-to-medium-enterprises that have illuminated how these organizations have interacted with the increasing availability of powerful information and communications technologies. Of course, such IS studies examined more than just technology. These took more holistic views of the social-technical systems based on such technology. As we would expect, these studies centered on the changing organizations as the business, social and organizational impacts of the technology unfolded. However, once this technological power continued to march downward in terms of organizational scope finally reaching a single individual, IS interests waned. Families and individual persons now possess progressively European Journal of Information Systems (2011) 20, 251–254 & 2011 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved 0960-085X/11