Re-examining the Status of IT in IT Research - An Update on Orlikowski and Iacono (2001)

Nearly 10 years ago, Orlikowski and Iacono examined the conceptualization of Information Technology in Information Systems Research (ISR) articles published in 1990s, and found that the majority of these articles were not thoroughly engaged with IT artifact. They proposed that IS researchers should start to theorize about the IT artifact and employ rich conceptualizations of IT. In order to assess the field’s response to Orlikowski and Iacono’s recommendations, and obtain an up-to-date image of the contemporary IS research, we carried out a similar analysis on a recent set of articles, i.e. the full set of papers published in the last three years of ISR, Management Information Systems Quarterly (MISQ), and Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS). Our results reveal no drastic progress in terms of deeper engagement with IT artifact; 30% of the articles in our set are virtually mute about the artifact, and only 10% are employing an ensemble view of IT. Nevertheless, there are informative discrepancies between patterns in our results and those in the original study, and noticeable differences among the three journals. Implications of these findings for future research will be discussed

IT Artifacts and The State of IS Research

To understand the state of IS research is, to a large extent, to understand (1) what are considered IT artifacts by IS scholars, and (2) how do IS scholars approach IT artifacts in their studies. This study addresses these two questions by providing a conceptual model of five types of core IT artifacts and a five-facet framework of IS scholars’ approaches to studying IT artifacts. Using a critical literature review, the conceptualizations are tested with the collective wisdom by IS scholars in the most recent IS studies published in the 2009 and 2010 ICIS proceedings. The findings shed light on where the IS discipline is standing in terms of its focus on IT artifacts. Implications for research and practice are discussed. This study contributes to our continued understanding of the development and evolution of the IS discipline and the potential directions it may take

The Concept of Creativity in the Information Systems Discipline: Past, Present, and Prospects

In 1993 Couger et al. stated in an MIS Quarterly article on creativity in information systems (IS) organizations that the topic of creativity is under-researched in the IS discipline. Is the subject of creativity—despite its undisputable importance for individuals, organizations, and societies—still a neglected area in IS research? In what contexts, with what methods, and with what results have IS researchers studied the phenomenon of creativity? And what creativity-related themes warrant further investigation? In this article we analyze, based on six analytical dimensions, IS studies on creativity published in the eight top-ranked IS journals as recommended by the Association for Information Systems. The analysis provides a detailed picture of how the concept of creativity has been treated in our discipline’s arguably most influential publication outlets. It becomes apparent that IS researchers have been predominantly employing a rather limited number of research designs aiming at a rather limited number of creativity-related topics. Grounded in our analysis, we discuss the prospects of creativity research in the IS discipline and provide a future research agenda. In doing so, we propose three main research themes that can meaningfully contribute to our discipline