Material Detail

In addition to my role as an economist, I have over three decades experience as a network and system administration providing Internet-based services to the public. When I taught Business Information Systems for the first time in Fall 2023, I adopted an expensive commercial text then in its eighth edition that had been previously used by my colleagues. I found that text poorly-written, insufficiently-updated, and often outright wrong. Having vowed never to use it again, I'm evaluating version 2.1 of Information Systems for Business and Beyond for use this fall. My initial assessment is that it compares favorably with the commercial text I used previously. The present authors have adapted the text written by David Bourgeois by adding material from other open access resources and updating the material to stay current—something that's crucial for this subject. The result is a complete, attractive text with supplementary resources like slide decks and test banks that could easily be the sole or main text of a business-focused course in information systems. For my purposes, the only significant missing component is more detailed coverage of using spreadsheets for data analysis, and accompanying exercises; this is critical for the desired outcomes in the course I teach, but may be irrelevant to other instructors. Still, adopting this text would allow me to focus on adding that component, while giving my students are better text than last fall while also saving them money. While the material in Information Systems for Business and Beyond is more accurate than that in the commercial textbook I used previously, there are still some errors that belie the authors' lack of deep technical knowledge. For example, this sentence from section 10.8 is a real howler: "The fewer the number of confirmations requested – you can request zero – the lower the fee to send coins; there is never a fee to receive Bitcoins." Similar, but less egregious, are the definitions of "client" and "server" in section 6.3: "Networks include clients and servers. The client is the application that runs on a personal computer or workstation. It relies on a server that manages network resources or performs special tasks…" (An obvious counterexample would be the roles of a client and a server in the X Window System.) That said, all the chapters I read closely are both more accurate and more concise than the corresponding chapters in the text I used previously, and I believe this text has great potential.