Boundaries and Quandaries: Establishing a Professional Context for IT

Abstract

The professionalization of IT has long been complicated by disagreement over the appropriate model to employ. Physicians, lawyers, scientists, engineers, artisans, and artists have all one been invoked at one time or another by one group or another as guiding examples for the development of an IT profession. Yet none of these has proved fully convincing. Discusses the different kinds of professional practice which have been likened to IT, considers why it has proved so difficult to settle on a single one, and suggests an alternative way of conceptualizing IT practice.