Frank Land

Frank Land

Frank F Land FBCS is an information systems researcher and was the first UK Professor of Information Systems. He is currently emeritus professor in the Department of Information Systems at the London School of Economics (LSE).

His wife is the operations researcher Professor Ailsa Land.

After graduating in Economics from the LSE in 1950, Land joined the London food and catering enterprise J. Lyons, working on the first electronic computer designed for business use, the LEO I.

In 1967 Land was selected for a newly established post in what later became the Department of Information Systems at LSE. Here he became involved with the development and definition of the subject and its curriculum. He chaired working parties for the British Computer Society, the National Computing Centre and the Council for National Academic Awards concerned with curriculum development. He worked with an international group to establish the International Federation for Information Processing's (IFIP) curriculum for information systems designers. At the LSE he set up the ADMIS (Analysis, Design and Management of Information Systems) Masters course and developed a Ph.D. program.

In 1982 Land was appointed as the UK's first professor of Information Systems. In 1986 he moved to the London Business School as Professor of Information Management. He has served as Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (the Wharton School), Sydney University, Bond University, Curtin University, and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA).

He has been awarded an honorary doctorate in science and the IFIP award for distinguished service. He has served as technical advisor to House of Commons Select Committees examining IT in the UK.

Land retired from full time academic work in 1992 and is currently Visiting Professor of Information Management at the LSE and at Leeds Metropolitan University.

In 2003 Land was jointly awarded the Association for Information Systems' LEO Award with Dr Jack F Rockart of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for lifetime exceptional achievement. The award recognised seminal contributions to research, theory development, and practice in Information Systems.