The culture change driven by social, economic and politics has lead to the increasing amount of information, in succession of rising innovations in the methods of handling it in information systems (IS). This paved the way for our world to move into the information age carrying forward a new wave of hope that implementing information systems would bring cumulative impacts to the way they communicate and operate, or Brown & Duguid said "to transform the dinosaurs of the industrial age into phoenixes for digital age".
Shannon (1948) defined information as the reduction of uncertainty in a communication system such as bits of DNA, light from a distant star but information systems is the methods and techniques by which human manage, process and deal with information, rather than the content of the information itself or it is called the technologies of knowledge. Base on Headrick's "Taxonomy of IS", we have five categories. In the first category, there are many systems for gathering information such as surveys, censuses, R&D labs that are carried out by researchers and journalists. A second category contains systems for naming, classifying, organizing pieces of information in order to make them understandable and comparable effectively. For example, a company classify their staffs by profiles and positions; a university classify students by major and year. These systems are normally managed by organisations that can control a vast amount of information such as the police. Next, students have been taught to turn description into lists and lists into statistical tables, graphs which are all the systems in third category used to transform information from one form into another form and present it in a different way. After this, we have many systems in fourth group for storing and retrieving information, for instance, telephone books, calendar, museum, libraries or dictionaries. Lastly, the fifth category includes systems for communicating information.