Criteria and Recommendations for IS Research that Bridges the Academic-Practitioner Gap

Industry practitioners deal with complex and fast-moving information system (IS) related challenges. IS academic researchers generate substantive theoretical outputs dealing with many of these challenges. Unfortunately, practitioners rarely make use of this academic research. This represents a serious gap that has negative consequences for academics and practitioners alike. This paper identifies aspects of the academic-practitioner gap and describes five criteria (value, velocity, visibility, voice, and verifiability) that researchers may use throughout the research process to increase the likelihood of creating research outputs that will be used by practitioners. These criteria are linked to three approaches for conducting research most likely to impact practitioners – direct creation of practitioner content, translation of scholarly research and co-production. We close with specific recommendations for IS academics to overcome the gap

The Role of Academic Associations in Promoting Social Action

This paper debates whether the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and similar academic associations should leverage their power, resources, and collective expertise to promote the utilization of information technology for supporting social action undertaken by its members. Social action refers to activities designed to generate an impact on the well-being of society. The paper suggests that the AIS should advance cautiously by supporting and empowering members in their quest to engage in social action. The paper also explores the mechanisms needed to realize this vision. We conclude that the community should hold further debates on the scope of the association’s involvement and procedures in various fora of interest

The Effects of the Quantification of Faculty Productivity: Perspectives from the Design Science Research Community

In recent years, efforts to assess faculty research productivity have focused more on the measurable quantification of academic outcomes. For benchmarking academic performance, researchers have developed different ranking and rating lists that define so-called high-quality research. While many scholars in IS consider lists such as the Senior Scholar’s basket (SSB) to provide good guidance, others who belong to less-mainstream groups in the IS discipline could perceive these lists as constraining. Thus, we analyzed the perceived impact of the SSB on information systems (IS) academics working in design science research (DSR) and, in particular, how it has affected their research behavior. We found the DSR community felt a strong normative influence from the SSB. We conducted a content analysis of the SSB and found evidence that some of its journals have come to accept DSR more. We note the emergence of papers in the SSB that outline the role of theory in DSR and describe DSR methodologies, which indicates that the DSR community has rallied to describe what to expect from a DSR manuscript to the broader IS community and to guide the DSR community on how to organize papers for publication in the SSB

Tool Support for Design Science Research—Towards a Software Ecosystem: A Report from a DESRIST 2017 Workshop

The information systems (IS) field contains a rich body of knowledge on approaches, methods, and frameworks that supports researchers in conducting design science research (DSR). It also contains some consensus about the key elements of DSR projects—such as problem identification, design, implementation, evaluation, and abstraction of design knowledge. Still, we lack any commonly accepted tools that address the needs of DSR scholars who seek to structure, manage, and present their projects. Indeed, DSR endeavors, which are often complex and multi-faceted in nature and involve various stakeholders (e.g., researchers, developers, practitioners, and others), require the support that such tools provide. Thus, to investigate the tools that DSR scholars actually need to effectively and efficiently perform their work, we conducted an open workshop with DSR scholars at the 2017 DESRIST conference in Karlsruhe, Germany, to debate 1) the general requirement categories of DSR tool support and 2) the more specific requirements. This paper reports on the results from this workshop. Specifically, we identify nine categories of requirements that fall into the three broad phases (pre-design, design, and post design) and that contribute to a software ecosystem for supporting DSR endeavors

Waking Up a Sleeping Giant: Lessons from Two Extended Pilots to Transform Public Organizations by Internal Crowdsourcing

Digital transformation is a main driver for change, evolution, and disruption in organizations. As digital transformation is not solely determined by technological advancements, public environments necessitate changes in organizational practice and culture alike. A mechanism that seeks to realize employee engagement to adopt innovative modes of problem-solving is internal crowdsourcing, which flips the mode of operation from top-down to bottom-up. This concept is thus disrupting public organizations, as it heavily builds on IT-enabled engagement platforms that overcome the barriers of functional expertise and routine processes. Within this paper, we reflect on two design science projects that were piloted for six months within public organizations. We derive insights on the sociotechnical effects of internal crowdsourcing on organizational culture, social control, individual resources, motivation, and empowerment. Furthermore, using social cognitive theory, we propose design propositions for internal crowdsourcing, that guide future research and practice-oriented approaches to enable innovation in public organizations

Against Theory: With Apologies to Feyerabend

This essay explores the fixation the field of information systems has with “theory” and my frustration with this focus, examining where this theory focus came from, why it has been so widely adopted, and how it has led to dysfunction. It also offers some recommended action items that the field can take to redirect its efforts in order to become more relevant, resilient, and resourceful. These actions include, broadening the aperture of what legitimate IS research should include, imploring journal editors to change the way “applied” research is handled, bringing back books as an accepted and valued publication outlet, and moving the field in the direction of engagement

A Boundary Spanning Perspective of Practical Impact: The Case of IS Practitioner Doctorates

IS research often seeks to deliver practical impact, in addition to the traditional requirement for theoretical contribution. While an admirable goal, it is nevertheless a challenging prospect, as key questions remain around how to best facilitate a relationship between IS academic and practitioner communities. To explore this question, our paper investigates boundary spanning by ‘practitioner doctorates’ - PhD students with professional experience who seek to span the fields of academia and practice during their research. Drawing on in-depth interviews with practitioner doctorates, our findings point towards several factors for practical impact such as researcher legitimacy, expectation management, and adapting to changes in industry requirements. In doing so, we contribute towards an understanding of engaged scholarship in IS and take steps towards addressing the dearth of research on doctoral studies in the IS field to date

Integrating Explanatory/Predictive and Prescriptive Science in Information Systems Research

The scholarly information systems (IS) field has a dual role. As an explanatory and predictive science, the field contributes to explaining the pervasive IS that shape the digital age and sometimes also makes predictions about those phenomena. As a prescriptive science, it participates in creating IS-related innovations by identifying means-ends relationships. The two can beneficially interact, such as when explanatory theory provides the basis for generating prescriptions or when applicable knowledge produces explanatory insights. In this commentary, we contribute to integrating these two roles by proposing a framework to help IS researchers navigate the field’s duality to extend the cumulative scholarly knowledge that it creates in terms of justified explanations and predictions and justified prescriptions. The process we describe builds on ongoing, dynamic, iterative, and interrelated research cycles. We identify a set of integrative research practices that occur at the interface between explanatory and predictive science and prescriptive science—the explanation-prescription nexus. We derive guidelines for IS research

If Practice Makes Perfect, Where do we Stand?

Practitioners have played an important role in the information system (IS) field’s development since its beginnings. In the 1970s, IS researchers’ integration with practitioners was high with Society for Information Management members receiving copies of the MIS Quarterly, practitioners funding the ICIS Doctoral Consortium, and submissions receiving at least one practitioner review. Today, however, the integration between practitioners and researchers appears more distant. Given that almost 50 years have passed since the field’s development, we believe that we need to reflect on the past, present, and future relationship between IS research and IS practice. Has the distance between academics and practitioners become too great? Is our relevance too low to expect practitioners to join AIS and attend our conferences? How might we increase the integration? At a panel at ICIS 2018, several panelists provided position statements about those issues