What is IST?

In stead of thinking of IST as flavor of a drink, I rather consider IST as a modern abstract painting which evokes many thoughts from a person who appreciate what the IST really is. Most of the time abstract painters have their hard time to make others understand what they try to convey. Likewise, IST is a very emerging discipline which is quit blending, if not mixing, the perspective of I, T, and P altogether. For abstract painters, it always takes some time to get recognized by their peers or by people since the concept of their paintings is very abstract. In the same way, it probably takes a great amount of time to gain visibility and importance from other disciplines. Nowadays, I still have heard some of IST students expressing their conceptualization about IST that “, IST is actually an innovative discipline; it is just a grouping of social sciences and hard sciences.” However, the above comment could be right. It is quite complicated to explicate what is the IST. Perhaps, the best way to get to know the IST is to see and understand its roadmap; let it continue and grow, for we may see the answer of the IST itself and the end of the journey.

Many of my friends ask me “, what is your department?” And when I get started to show what we are doing in the IST, I just have no idea where I should begin with. So far I still cannot find the answer for that. That point that I very want to make is the most important task for the IST itself is to gain recognition and visibility. Sometimes it is obscure to tell the people what we are doing. Maybe, one way to show the people what is IST is to show the structure of the IST. But we just can do so because we actually have not formulated research groups in IST into a more structured presentation. In my opinion, it very important to have departments formulated under the ITP umbrella. It will not only help other disciplines to understand what we are doing in IST, but also gain visibility and help them to visualize who we are.

If I am asked to identify myself under the IST umbrella, I would respond that I quite belong to the Center of Information Society (CIS). Why? My research interest is somewhat fitted very well in the CIS. My foci are about software offshore outsourcing, turnover and job burn-out in IT profession, and flaws in ICT policy in developing countries. Even though these research topics are quite diverse in nature, but they can relate to my uttermost cause: Social welfare. For the first one, I have to confess that I quite not appreciate the tagline of doing offshore outsourcing: Low cost, more productivity. As humans sharing the same world, we could not think only of profits we could possibly make. The offshore outsourcing companies should also more contribute back to local communities, not merely harvesting low-wage labors. Second, IT professionals are repeatedly reported as workers who are likely to be overloaded with their daily routines. Often, people view IT professionals as technological unites embedded with IT artifacts. It is in fact not. We cannot just assume that those IT professionals must be on-call 24/7. They are just humans, and they just need to gain realization that they need certain degree of freedom to balance their life and work. Lastly, it is an illusion that most of developing countries simply duplicate ICTpolicy from the “successful” countries. And host developing countries just simply expect a miracle from deploy such policy over their countries. What is wrong is that every country has unique characteristics, and these should be counted in order to implement an effective ICT policy.