Importance of IS to Society

1.3 Importance of IS to Society

Suggested retrieval lesson: 20–30 minutes.

Recall first

1. Why can the same information system increase both inclusion and exclusion?
2. Name three social benefits and three social risks of IS.
3. What is the digital divide?

Answer without notes first.

Why society depends on information systems

Information systems (IS) collect, process, store, and distribute information for people, organizations, governments, and communities. They support communication, commerce, education, healthcare, transport, scientific research, public administration, and emergency response. The social value is not “more technology”; it is better capability to coordinate scarce resources, make services reachable, and make decisions informed. OpenStax, “Introduction to Information Systems”

Benefits

• Economic: digital payments, online markets, logistics, productivity, entrepreneurship, and new forms of work.
• Public services: electronic records and portals can reduce queues, coordinate agencies, and make benefits easier to access.
• Education and knowledge: online learning, digital libraries, collaboration, and rapid dissemination of research.
• Health and safety: health records, telemedicine, decision support, disease surveillance, and emergency alerts.
• Participation and community: low-cost communication, civic information, collaborative knowledge, and support networks.
• Transparency and accountability: searchable records and audit trails can expose delays or misuse—if access and data quality are sound.

Costs and ethical tensions

• Digital divide: unequal access to devices, reliable connectivity, affordability, accessibility, and digital skills. A service that is “online only” can exclude the people it is intended to help.
• Privacy and surveillance: collecting data can improve service personalization but can also enable tracking, profiling, or secondary use without meaningful consent.
• Security and resilience: outages, breaches, fraud, and ransomware can interrupt essential services.
• Employment and inequality: automation can displace tasks; benefits may accrue to owners and highly skilled workers unless reskilling and fair transition exist.
• Bias and dignity: data and algorithms can reproduce historical discrimination or make decisions difficult to challenge.
• Misinformation and attention harms: fast distribution does not guarantee truth; platform incentives can amplify harmful content.
• Environmental cost: devices, data centres, energy use, and e-waste create externalities.

A balanced answer evaluates who benefits, who bears risk, who controls the data, whether people can opt out or appeal, and how the system behaves when it fails. Ethical IS design includes accessibility, purpose limitation, security, accountability, and human alternatives—not only technical efficiency.

Worked decision scenario: digital welfare portal

A government replaces paper applications with a mobile portal. It may lower processing time and make status tracking easier. But people without a smartphone, stable internet, disability support, or confidence using the portal may be excluded. A socially responsible design keeps assisted in-person/telephone channels, uses accessible language and interfaces, minimizes collected data, publishes eligibility rules, logs decisions, protects records, and provides a human appeal route. The system’s success measure should include equitable completion rates and error/appeal rates, not only cost per application.

Exercise — reveal after committing

A city installs cameras with automatic number-plate recognition to reduce theft. Give one public benefit, two risks, and two safeguards.

Revealed answer: Benefit: faster investigation or deterrence. Risks: mass tracking and false matches leading to unjust action or data breach. Safeguards: strict purpose/retention/access limits, independent oversight, accuracy testing, and a human verification/appeal process. Any equivalent answer is acceptable if it addresses benefit, privacy, accuracy, and accountability.

Exam lens

• Do not write only a list of benefits; show a benefit–risk trade-off.
• Distinguish the digital divide (unequal ability to access/use benefits) from a normal technology gap inside one organization.
• Link IS to society through stakeholders: citizens, workers, businesses, government, vulnerable groups, and the environment.
• “Efficient” is not automatically “socially desirable”; fairness, privacy, security, accessibility, and accountability matter.

Rapid revision checklist

• Define IS’s social role in one sentence.
• Recall economic, public-service, education, health, and participation benefits.
• Recall digital divide, privacy, security, employment, bias, misinformation, and environmental risks.
• Evaluate who benefits and who bears risk.
• Include human alternatives and appeal in high-stakes examples.

Key takeaways

1. IS is social infrastructure: it changes access, coordination, work, and participation.
2. Inclusion requires access, skills, affordability, and accessibility—not just a website.
3. Privacy, security, fairness, resilience, and accountability are part of system quality.
4. A strong exam answer evaluates distribution and trade-offs, not technology as inherently good or bad.

Sources

• Rainer & Prince, Management Information Systems (Wiley) — textbook exam framing.
• Laudon & Laudon, Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm, 10th ed. — textbook exam framing.
• Boddy & Boonstra, Managing Information Systems: Strategy and Organization — textbook exam framing.
• OpenStax, “Introduction to Information Systems” — supplement for IS’s role in organizations and personal life.
• OECD, Digital Economy Outlook — supplement for digital transformation and societal policy context.