Introduction

The evolution and dissemination of technologies that deal with digitally coded information have been causing profound changes in several spheres of our lives. These changes pose fascinating challenges to the academic community and to professionals whose areas of expertise are related to the creation of new artifacts based on those technologies. This is especially true for artifacts enhancing innovative forms of participation at work and in society, and for the processes of adoption and exploitation of those technologies in work contexts or other contexts involving social interaction.

The Department of Information Systems brings together teachers and researchers whose teaching and R&D skills and interests are strongly related to those challenges. The Department assumes as essential to its performance the combination of skills in creating artefacts based on information technologies with skills resulting from the understanding of human and social phenomena associated with the adoption and exploitation of those artefacts and the use of information. Special attention is paid to organizations (companies and other institutions, public or private), as particularly relevant spaces where such phenomena occur.

The Information Systems Department is associated with the Information Systems and Technologies scientific area (information systems and technologies), which, at international level, also appears under the designations of Information Systems (information systems) or Management Information Systems (management information systems). Reflecting what was said above about the competences and interests of the department, this area includes R&D and teaching practices that combine paradigms from engineering and from human and social sciences.

The creation of the Information Systems Department in 1999 resulted from the autonomisation of one of the areas of activity of the Computer Science Department - management computing/information systems. With the creation in the early 1990s of a new degree in this area - the Degree in Management Informatics, currently a Degree in Bachelor's degree in Engineering and Information Systems Management  - this area significantly increased its dimension and performance capacity, thus justifying its creation as a new department.