Background
My views on Information Systems have been heavily influenced by an Industrial Engineering background, growing up with my father's engineering background and manufacturing company where I worked part time during my high-school and university years. My undergraduate thesis project was also in that area: the design of a process for integrating decentralized manufacturing execution systems at ABB Kraftwerke AG (the power plant division of ABB). Being on the manufacturing shop floor amid big drills, lathes, cranes and flexible manufacturing systems provides a unique perspective on how IT works within a business.
I have also been heavily influenced by the Continental European perspective on IS which emphasises systems engineering and design research over behavioral research. At the Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik at the University of Münster, I chose concentrations in software engineering and industrial computing. This included many courses on practical computer science, data modeling, database design, business process modeling and similar. In contrast, it was only during my PhD studies at the University of British Columbia that I began to appreciate the behavioral research perspective prevalent in the North American IS research tradition. Finally, my stay in New Zealand exposed me to the more interpretivist and humanistic perspective on Information Systems, which was very strong at the School of Information Management at Victoria University.
Head over to my bookshelf to find out which books have had a lasting impression on me as well.