Commentary on the Intellectual Structures of Information Systems Development by Hirschheim, Klein and Lyytinen

How might one begin to comment on a paper of this scope and ambition? Allow me, firstly, to start this commentary by expressing my gratitude for the opportunity to comment on such a seminal work. This paper is seminal not necessarily in terms of its content as such but, more importantly, in terms of its form. It is in the bold and obviously risky step of proposing an intellectual framework for a severely fragmented discipline such as Information Systems that, in my view, the real contribution is to be found. It requires theoretical and intellectual giants with a vast understanding of the whole corpus of literature, such as is true of the authors, to undertake this clearly ambitious project. And they did it with obvious distinction. It is my hope that this paper, although seminal, would merely be the opening statement in a discourse about the intellectual structures (or the lack thereof) of our discipline. This is a discourse long overdue. Notwithstanding this, as a first statement one could not have hoped for any better than such an elaborate and eloquent piece of work as presented here. Given the nature of the work there are so many aspects one can select to comment on. The decision on where to focus has been a challenge in itself. After considerable reflection I have decided to focus my comments on two more fundamental meta-aspects of the paper in the following manner.