'Lifelong Achievement' award for Peter Checkland
Published 14 December 2007
Professor Peter Checkland is the recipient of the first 'Lifelong Achievement Award in Information Management' awarded at the 1st International Conference on Information Management held in November 2007 in Amsterdam. Professor Checkland's infuential soft systems methodology (SSM) is internationally recognised.
Known as the I + M Award, I + M refers to the Foundation of the University of Amsterdam that organises executive programmes in Information Management, a programme now in its twentieth year. In the future the award will be made annually. The award itself was a ceramic sculpture by Monique Muylaert, a well known Belgian artist.
Born in 1930 in Birmingham, Peter Checkland was educated at George Dixon’s Grammar School and St John’s College Oxford, from where he graduated with 1st class honours in chemistry in 1954. Following a 15-year successful research career at ICI Fibres he joined Lancaster’s pioneering Department of Systems Engineering in 1969 as Professor of Systems.
At Lancaster, for the next 30 years with colleagues and Masters students, he led a programme of action research, much of it organised through the UK’s first university consultancy company, ISCOL. From this continuous cycle of intervention in ill-structured management problems and learning from the results, emerged a fully developed SSM. Critical to this development was Peter’s recognition that purposeful human activity can be modelled systemically.
Rather than SSM models attempting to map the real world – impossible because there are multiple candidates for what counts as the real world in complex situations – the models are devices for learning about the real world. In short, SSM becomes a process of inquiry, a learning system. These ideas were used extensively in the MSc in Systems, and later in the MSc in Information Management. In the field of information management Peter has been concerned with IS and its relationship to IT, and in particular the contribution that systems ideas, or the process of thinking systemically, can make to the modeling and understanding of this relationship.
Peter’s work is published in many leading journals and in four key books, including the seminal Systems Thinking, Systems Practice now in its 25th year of print, and Information, Systems and Information Systems: making sense of the field, with Sue Holwell. In an academic field in which ideas too often imitate fashion Peter Checkland’s constant pursuit of rigour and relevance in tackling complex infomation management problems is a model for others who follow.
