The Academic Genealogy of the Scholars of the Information Systems Discipline Lee Freeman, College of Business, University of Michigan-Dearborn Follow Johann Kranz, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich Andrew Urbaczewski, United States Air Force Academy and University of Denver George Westerman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract

Despite the relative youth of our information systems discipline, many of us do not know the founders of our field or the academic “families” that have helped shape us into what we are today. We have changed greatly over the past few decades, both topically and geographically. As the Information Systems (IS) discipline enters its second half-century, now is a good time to identify the origins of our academic community while some of the founders are still with us. We have created a web-enabled “family tree” of more than 11 thousand IS scholars that investigators can use to examine where we came from, where we are going, and how we can position our field for future academic generations. The genealogical data can be used to show the trajectory of our research, the influences that shape our field, and the influences of organizational designs and the broader environment.