Using Scenarios to Understand the Frontiers of IS

Fifteen years ago, Paul Gray and I wrote the above article describing four potential trajectories technology may take (Gray and Hovav, 1999). The trajectories were developed based on a number of general assumptions and by using scenario building methodology. When I read the paper over in preparation for writing this postscript, it occurred to me that “had I known then what I know now...” I found our outlook somewhat naïve, techno centric and at points shortsighted. Hindsight is of course always 20/20. The key to good scenario building is not to try and describe a predictable future but to create a set of diverse futures and analyze the drivers and consequences of each. As such, scenario building methodologies often represent the views of the researchers that use them and the state-ofaffairs at the time they are developed. In the late 1990s, our discipline’s foci were on organization, inter-organization and at best industry level use/effect of technology. As the reach of the Internet increased and technologies such as Web 2.0, social networks, mobile computing (smart phones, tablets) and the cloud became dominant, our discipline expanded its investigative boundaries to include topics such as the effect of technology on society, ethics, and culture, and unintended consequences of technology (e.g., addiction, cyber bulling). In this postscript, I will highlight the differences between our predictions and the current state-of-affairs. The rest of the postscript is organized as follow: in the next section, I describe the main drivers and propose a slightly different approach to the four scenarios that Paul and I introduced in 1999. Then, I briefly summarize the variables that did follow our initial proposed trajectory followed by a section discussing the variables that did not materialize as we predicted. In section five, I introduce globalization as a potential catalyst. Section six describes two trends we did not include in our 1999 paper. I end with concluding remarks and call for action.