Frank Land

Fred Frank Land OBE (born Frank Landsberger; October 1928) is a German-born information systems researcher and was the first United Kingdom Professor of Information Systems. He is currently emeritus professor in the Department of Information Systems at the London School of Economics (LSE). He was married to Ailsa Land, a professor of Operations Research.

Land is an identical twin. He and his brother Ralph were born in Berlin into a well-off Jewish family, who fled to the UK in 1939 in the aftermath of Kristallnacht.  He and his brother changed their name from Landsberger to Land on the advice of a careers advisor at the LSE.  Land was educated at Willesden County Grammar School from 1943 to 1947 and after graduating in Economics from the LSE in 1950, he joined the London food and catering enterprise J. Lyons, working on the first electronic computer designed for business use, the LEO I with his colleague Mary Coombs.

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 selected for the AIS LEO Award with Jack F. Rockart of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for lifetime exceptional achievement. The LEO Award, established in 1999 by the Association for Information Systems and the International Conference on Information Systems, recognises seminal contributions to research, theory development, and practice in Information Systems.

Land was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to the information systems industry.