At this
year's 2011 conference of the
UK Association for Information Systems, the keynote speaker,
David Wainwright of Northumbria University, presented a lecture on the PhD Odyssey: Information Systems, Adventure and Adversity by comparing the PhD journey with that of
Odysseus, full of troubles, trials and tribulations, an apt analogy. One of the Odysseus' distractions was
Circe, a villaneous and bewitching goddess who turned Odysseus' men into swine. Wainwright's argument was that a PhD student can be betwitched by the focus of the PhD. He presented a diagram, which from my notes I sketch here,
where the implication seems to be that your PhD focus might be in any one of these blobs. It's an interesting diagram because it incorporates so much of the overlap between areas relevant to information systems, the central three being
- Digital Media
- Information Systems
- Computing
My initial reaction was that my research sits in the business management blob, but perhaps it actually sits in the
interaction between management practitioners and computing practitioners, because although I start from the use and adaptation of IS for organisations, what I'm really interested in is the relationship of people in different organisations on the same project, and such people include management practitioners and computing practitioners, often the computing practitioners being external. So my focus isn't in a blob, but in the interaction between blogs.
where the implication seems to be that your PhD focus might be in any one of these blobs. It's an interesting diagram because it incorporates so much of the overlap between areas relevant to information systems, the central three being
