Paradigm shift: Cultural implications for development of IS professionals

Globalization increasingly highlights the need to understand cultural differences worldwide. This is particularly relevant to IS professionals who participate in the development of systems that transcend cultural borders. At the same time, the changing role of IS from support to driver in organizational strategies brings with it a need for a different set of skills in the IS profession. This has been described as the IS paradigm shift, and implies that the IS professional of the future may need to be more focused on the business rather than technical processes. A cross-cultural study that examines the expectations of graduating IS professionals in Hong Kong and the US compared with the reality of the IS profession as perceived by past graduates is discussed. Not only is there a severe difference between the expectations and their realization, there are also differences between the 2 cultures. These results have a number of implications for IS personnel policies and for IS education worldwide. Copyright © 1995 IGI Global.