IS Body of Knowledge

From IS Curriculum

A specific discipline may be defined by its associated body of knowledge. The Information Systems body of knowledge consists of three major subject areas:

1.0 Information Technology

2.0 Organizational and Management Concepts

3.0 Theory and Development of Systems

Each subject area contains major topics and each major topic contains subtopics, which are the lowest level curriculum elements of the body of knowledge. A fourth level with more detail for third level elements is useful in describing curriculum content.

Sources Used in Defining the Body of Knowledge

Each of these subject areas represents specific domains of knowledge. The entire body of knowledge consists of more than a thousand elements in a four level hierarchy (Nunamaker, Couger, and Davis, 1982; DPMA, 1981,1986; Longenecker and Feinstein, 1991c; Longenecker, Feinstein et al., 1994). Adding the fourth level made it possible to include the more than 100 elements from the CS knowledge body by Turner and Tucker (1991) and the 120 elements from the software engineering body of knowledge. Elements of the software engineering body of knowledge were explicitly derived from analysis of curriculum content contained in reports on software engineering education developed by the Software Engineering Institute (Ford, 1990, 1991), and were based on the observations of Glass (1992), other reports from the SEI (Berry, 1992; Ford, Gibbs, and Tomayko, 1987; Ford and Ardis, 1989; Ford, 1994; Gibbs and Ford, 1986; Shaw, 1986, 1990; SEI, 1991; Tomayko and Shaw, 1991), and other efforts (BCS, 1989; Ford and Gibbs, 1989; Freeman, 1987; Gibbs, 1989; Leventhal and Mynatt, 1987; NSF, 1993; Parnas, 1990; Wasserman, 1976).

Two Level View of the Body of Knowledge

Table A5.1 shows a two level hierarchy of the body of knowledge. The three major subject areas are broken into subareas. While Table A5.1 shows only two levels, the complete body of knowledge available at the URL [1] contains the expansion to four levels. As reported in IS97 (Davis et al., 1997), earlier surveys suggest that there is a substantial agreement between industry expectations and the depth standard set by IS academics.