Fashion Waves in Information Systems

Response paper to Baskerville and Myers (2009)

When one mentions a word “Fashion” I am sure for most people, you mind will take you to a world of clothing and glamour trends. You immediately think of fashion parade, fashion week, Paris, Italy, New York etc. In my view, fashion trends are associated with time or seasons and they usually come and go. I’m sure you are probably wondering how fashion is associated with Information Systems. Well this week’s blog is an attempt to share and respond to Baskerville and Myers paper on technology fashion waves. 

Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999) define management fashion as a relatively transitory belief that a certain management technique leads rational management progress. On the other hand, Miller and Hartwick (2002) suggests that these fashion trends appear to be new and innovative, but some are in fact “just old wine in new bottles” and repackaging of old concepts.

If one takes into account the two definitions above, can one then classify cloud computing as fashion technology in the IS context? 

The origins of cloud computing technology can be traced back as far as the 1960’s when John MacCarthy wrote that “computation may someday be organized as a public utility.” All the way to the 90’s when Sales force.com delivered cloud business applications. This proves that cloud computing as a concept has been around for some time, however the question to ask is whether this technology will stand the test of time being, or is it just one of the technology “ fads and fancies” characterizing IT as referred to by Gregor and Jones (2007)?

Let me attempt answering this question by drawing your attention to Gartner’s cloud computing hype cycle.

Gartner predicts from the graph above that most of cloud services will reach plateau in the next 5 to 10 years. Interesting to note Gartner predicts that services like PaaS will soon be reaching plateau in the next 2-5 years.

One of Baskerville and Myers (2009) paper was to contribute to the discourse relationship between Information system research and practice by assessing the extent to which academics and practitioners influence the fashion trend setting process in IT. They concluded that IS professional should be more proactively engaged in influencing the fashion setting process and in the evaluation of existing IT fashion. However, looking at the recent research done in area of cloud computing, Scopus revealed that there’s over 960 researches done in this area between 2008 and 2015 still reflecting a positive trend and an interest in cloud computing.

In my view, I can conclude that cloud computing is indeed a fashion trend in IT but I do also believe that it is the type of technology that is still relevant and will continue evolving  and being of the key drivers for data increase and usage. The question of whether to adopt cloud or not by IT managers also points to the fact that it is still relevant like any other fashion trend.