When will information systems grow up? Ego development and IT

Abstract

Torbert has proposed eight stages of personal development that an individual manager may go through based on ideas of ego development in the field of psychology. He extended these to cover the development of the organisations. I think that it is useful at this stage in the development of information technology to try to extend this thinking to the development of information systems. I present a table listing Torbert's stages of personal and organisational development and then introduce the proposed equivalent stages in the development of information systems.