In my first year of MIS, I thought the degree was about technology. By my third year, I understood it was about people. The technology is just the medium.
That shift in perspective is, I think, the most important thing an MIS education can give you — but it doesn't always arrive on its own. Sometimes you have to go looking for it.
The trap of the technically correct solution
There's a very comfortable place to hide in technical work: correctness. The database schema is normalised. The query runs in under 200ms. The system does exactly what the specification said. You're done.
Except the specification was wrong, because nobody asked the actual users what they needed. And now you have a technically correct system that nobody uses, because it was built for a problem that wasn't quite the real problem.
I've seen this pattern in case studies, in internship stories, in post-mortems of failed enterprise software rollouts. The technical work was fine. The understanding of the human context was not.
What designers do differently
Designers — real ones, not people who make things look pretty — start with a question that most technical people ask too late: what is the person trying to accomplish, and what's getting in their way?
Not "what feature do they want?" Features are solutions. You need to understand the problem before you can evaluate a solution. And the problem is almost always more human than it is technical.
Design thinking, as a formal methodology, gives you tools for this: user interviews, journey mapping, rapid prototyping, iteration. But the underlying habit of mind is simpler than the methodology. It's just the practice of holding your own assumptions lightly, and staying genuinely curious about how other people experience things.
Why this is specifically an MIS superpower
Most pure designers don't have deep technical literacy. They know what systems can theoretically do, but they don't always know what's actually feasible, what's expensive, what creates technical debt that compounds over years. They propose elegant solutions that are sometimes impossible to build.
Most pure engineers don't have deep human-context literacy. They know what they can build, but they're sometimes asking the wrong question about what to build.
MIS sits exactly at this intersection. We're trained in both the technical vocabulary and the business/human context. If we add design thinking to that — genuine curiosity about users, comfort with ambiguity, willingness to throw away a technically elegant solution that doesn't fit the human need — we become something genuinely unusual.
People who can translate between the machine and the human. People who can walk into a room of engineers and a room of end-users and be taken seriously in both.
That's not a small thing. In most organisations, that translation is the bottleneck. Be the translator.