Business informatics: The incomplete transformation of a range of practices for empirical research

Abstract

In the second half of the 1960s, hardware manufacturers, software and computing service companies, and IT departments argued that the problems encountered by companies and administrations as they adopted computer technology could be solved by putting the responsibility for training computer scientists increasingly in the hands of public higher education institutions. However, this claim remains ambiguous because it implies a critique of the autonomy of university programs. The dominant position of fundamental computer science in university curricula was accused of producing computer scientists who would be unusable by companies, thus reflecting universities’ maladjustment to social and economic changes. In this context, public policies for IT training aim to reduce the share of basic IT in education in favor of management IT. Since business applications account for 80% of computer use, by the end of the 1970s, business computing education should account for 80% of the flow of computer science students.