On Dinosaurs, Measurement Ideologists, Separatists, and Happy Souls - Proposing and Justifying a Way to Make the Global IS/BISE Community Happy

This article constitutes an "editorialized", partly shortened, and partly extended version of the paper "Business and information systems engineering: a complementary approach to information systems - what we can learn from the past and may conclude from present reflection on the future" by Hans Ulrich Buhl, Günter Müller, Gilbert Fridgen, and Maximilian Röglinger that appeared in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems 13(4):236-253, April 2012. The editorial has been presented as a keynote on the BIS conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, in May 2012 and the BISE workshop in Hannover, Germany, in October 2012. An earlier version has been published in the BIS proceedings

Information Systems for “Wicked Problems” – Proposing Research at the Intersection of Social Media and Collective Intelligence

The objective of this commentary is to propose some fruitful research direction built upon the reciprocal interplay of social media and collective intelligence. We focus on “wicked problems” — a class of what Introne et al. 2013 call “problems for which no single computational formulation of the problem is sufficient, for which different stakeholders do not even agree on what the problem really is, and for which there are no right or wrong answers, only answers that are better or worse from different points of view”. We argue that information systems research in particular can aid in designing appropriate systems due to benefits derived from the combined perspectives of both social media and collective intelligence. We document the relevance and timeliness of social media and collective intelligence for business and information systems engineering, pinpoint needed functionality of information systems for wicked problems, describe related research challenges, highlight prospective suitable methods to tackle those challenges, and review examples of initial results