IT/IS Management and Research Directions

The author spent much of the years prior to January 2000 as an international consultant for Y2K issues. During this period, a very large quantity of quantitative and qualitative data has been collected, together with many one-to-one interviews with very prominent IT leaders in business. This data led to extensive empirical research concerning the real ills of the IT/IS industry, with fascinating results. The phenomenology we have seen, in tens of installations, each with hundreds of millions of lines of code (or more) have shown the breadth of gap between academic research and real world business Information Technology / Information Systems. This paper attempts to point out part of this large gap and hopefully, shows some reasons for its continued existence. This paper is intended to trigger wider interest in IT / IS research