Introduction to information systems T. Cornford, M. Shaikh is1 060 2013

Chapter 4: Contemporary trends in 
information and communication 
technologies
4.1 Introduction
This course is about information systems, not about technology taken on 
its own. The technology we primarily consider, IT or ICT, is the subject 
of other academic fields such as electronics, computer science, software 
engineering, or communications engineering. Each of these fields is 
relevant to us at times, but they are in general at the edge of our primary 
concerns in this course. Thus for this course, it is not appropriate to see 
these technologies in isolation from their use by organisations and by 
people, the tasks they help us achieve, the reasons we use them, and the 
various services and infrastructures that they rely on. 
And yet, it is hard to talk about information systems without at the very 
least making some fairly important assumptions about the technology that 
is present as part of the information system, and what it is expected to do. 
Even the most ‘business’ oriented discussion of, for example, e-commerce, 
will be based on an assumption that the internet is widely available, 
generally reliable, safe and secure, and that certain software (for example, 
web browsers) and various types of devices (PC, tablets, smartphones) are 
available and work. 
Such a discussion may also need to reflect how the availability, 
characteristics and mode of use of all this technology changes over time. 
Ten or more years ago we had no really mobile devices as understood 
today – laptops in those days were known as ‘luggables’ and mobile 
phones in films from the late 1980s are the size of a house brick. Today in 
countries both rich and poor, we are used to using mobile phones to access 
information systems (or perhaps we should say as ‘part of’ information 
systems), and increasingly we are moving to multi-function tablet devices 
such as the Apple iPad. It is also fairly clear that in 10 more years (2023) 
things will have changed again, although the authors of this guide are not 
clever or confident enough to say exactly how. 
Many introductory books provide an adequate coverage of basic 
technologies, and most students taking this course will have some 
experience of using some types of ICT – although more in their personal 
lives than in a business or organisational context. What you read about 
technology in textbooks may at times seem a little dated. This is not 
surprising. First, because it takes time for a text book author to conclude 
that something is important, to write about it with examples, for the 
manuscript to be edited and the book to appear in a shop. (Although 
these same technologies might be able to speed up this process a bit 
perhaps?) But it also reflects the need for people who study technologies 
in organisational settings to understand that, while our attention may 
be drawn to all things new in technology, real organisations with long 
histories will have lots of older technology within them. So a little history, 
or attention to past trends, is still relevant knowledge today. And the 
language we use to speak about information systems is very influenced by 
that past too.

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IS1060 Introduction to information systems
46
Working with information systems today (in 2013) is not all about 
smartphones, iPads and social networking. It is a lot about managing the 
results of previous decisions and the technologies of previous generations. 
We even have a name for such systems and technology – we call them 
legacy systems or legacy technologies – that is, systems and technologies 
that are handed down from a previous generation. Often a project to 
develop a new information system is quite constrained by the legacy 
systems that surround it and which it will need to interact with.