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The Association for Information Systems was formally established in 1995. The governance structure was designed to create a truly international organization. The position of president rotates among three regions: Americas, Europe-Africa, and Asia Pacific Area. AIS has grown to include close to 50 percent of faculty members worldwide. AIS has allowed the field to concentrate and rationalize many of its resources. There has been an amalgamation of ICIS into AIS. It has taken over responsibility for preexisting assets of the field such as the Directories of IS Faculty, the past proceedings of ICIS, doctoral dissertation lists, survey of salaries for new hires, etc.

The needs of the users were rarely well established with the consequence that the design was frequently inappropriate to the application needs. The focus of effort was on getting something working and overcoming the limitations of the technology, such as making an application run in restricted amounts of memory. A particular problem was that the developers were technically trained but rarely good communicators. The dominant 'methodology' was rule-of-thumb and based on experience. This typically led to poor control and management of projects.

IFIP had a strong advantage in encouraging international cooperation and international workshops and conferences. This advantage stemmed from its role as a society of societies not identified with any one country. IFIP had one very important weakness. It disseminated conference proceedings through high cost books marketed through a commercial publisher. Royalties provided significant revenues to IFIP, but it made the proceedings too costly for individual purchase. Sales were very low, primarily to libraries and to conference attendees.