The Market of Ideas as the Center of the IS Field

The center of the IS field is presented as a market of ideas, an intellectual exchange related to the design and management of information technologies in organized human enterprise. In this view, the IS field is a loosely coupled system operating through weak social ties across intellectual communities. A loosely coupled system can operate towards contradictory goals of both plasticity and stability in the search for new research opportunities and generation of valid knowledge. The market of ideas allows reconciliation of rigor and relevance, technical and social, design and explanation. It lowers the barriers of established disciplinary regimes and institutions, and facilitates scholarship in fields where conditions change quickly. It helps to balance exploration and exploitation in an effort to avoid competency traps. Limitations of the metaphor are considered

Nurturing a Thriving Information Systems Discipline: A Call to Action

While the aspiration for the IS discipline\u27s bright future is a shared objective, there is a controversy about what are the fundamental challenges ahead let alone how to approach them. This panel addresses the question of what should we do to nurture a thriving IS discipline? Opinions regarding how to solidify the position of the IS discipline can be classified into five interrelated clusters: research-oriented approaches, teaching-oriented approaches, practice-oriented approaches, scholarship-oriented approaches, and organization-oriented approaches. Building on crowdsourcing within the IS community to inform a panel of senior scholars, we will engage in a debate about possible approaches to nurture and invigorate the IS discipline in the coming decade. Overall, we aim to inspire and spark grassroots-based collective action in pursuit of thriving IS scholarship. At minimum, we hope to stimulate new insights about the desired and possible futures of the IS discipline, and the instrumental steps to realize them

Overcoming Silo Thinking in the IS Discipline by Thinking Differently about IS and IT

This essay challenges fundamental, silo-oriented assumptions about the IS discipline. It shows how work system theory and its extensions form a potential basis for overcoming that silo-orientation and finding and exploiting areas of overlap with other disciplines. Within the IS discipline, this paper shows how WST and extensions provide a basis for thinking differently about fundamental topics including the following: IS as a system-related discipline, system usage, sociotechnical systems, planned and emergent change in systems, system development and systems analysis and design, user participation and IS/IT projects, attaining value from IS and IT, IS success, business/IT alignment, and IS theories and a body of knowledge for IS. This paper also shows directions toward synergies and possible collaborations with other disciplines that build on areas of overlap

ICIS 2008 Panel Report: Open Access Publishing to Nurture the Sprouts of Knowledge and the Future of Information Systems Research

The advent of the Internet and the subsequent adoption of Open Access schemata are changing the nature of the scholarly discourse. In response, we seek to stimulate a debate about the role and desired forms of Open Access publishing in the context of the Information System (IS) discipline. We explore the potential contribution of an Open Access perspective on publishing IS-related research and also discuss the roles of traditional journals and their prospects in the contexts of our observations. In particular, we focus on the new possibilities of publishing work-in-progress and its potential benefit for knowledge dissemination including the prospects of turning today\u27s limited scholarly exchange into mass collaboration. We illustrate our vision with a working prototype of an Open Access disciplinary repository entitled Sprouts (http://sprouts.aisnet.org). Our aim is to inspire new thinking about the role of Open Access publishing, the potential of its application to disciplinary repositories of emergent work, its anticipated repercussions on our work practices, and its long-term implication for the impact of IS scholarship and the well-being of our community at large. We call for participation and further action in realizing a global repository of IS research in progress. This paper builds on a panel on Open Access that was presented at the 2008 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), held in Paris, France, in December 2008

The Scholarly Impact of Exploitative and Explorative Knowledge in Top IS Journals

Recently, several scholars have argued that the information system (IS) field needs to reduce its reliance on reference theories and focus on developing “indigenous” theoretical knowledge, suggesting that such a shift may help to increase the independence of the IS discipline. While original IS theory is likely to have larger impacts, the uptake of such ideas may also be more uncertain. To investigate such effects, we conduct a scientometric study on 211 research articles published in the two top IS journals, MISQ and ISR. We investigate the uptake of studies that draw on exploitative (i.e., exploiting existing theories from other disciplines) and explorative (i.e., exploration of new theoretical frameworks within the discipline) knowledge, respectively. We find that explorative knowledge receives, on average, a higher quantity of citations. Over time explorative knowledge manifests a higher variance in citations received. Further, we find that explorative knowledge is more likely to assume more sophisticated conceptions of the IT artifact compared to exploitative knowledge. Last, exploitative knowledge, due to its platform nature, interacts with reputation effects to a greater degree than explorative knowledge. We conclude by providing guidance to both individual researchers as well as to the IS discipline as a whole

Research Directions in Information Systems: Toward an Institutional Ecology

This essay identifies three characteristic problems in how the Information Systems field sets its research directions. First is the propensity of our field to create research agendas modeled after the transitory infatuations that industry has with certain popular topics in IT-related innovation. The second problem is our field\u27s inclination to develop insular sub-communities that consume resources on behalf of research programs that are of limited theoretical and practical interest. A third problem is noted from time to time by our partners in industry: We sometimes neglect topics that are of practical interest to them. This paper argues that these seemingly diverse phenomena can be brought under a common umbrella by examining how the shaping of research agendas depends on forces in our field\u27s larger institutional milieu. Specifically, we suggest that the field\u27s research directions constitute responses to institutionally constituted market forces that arise both within academia and in the larger economy and society. Furthermore, we propose that the substance of the discourse associated with any particular research stream is dictated by the workings of these forces, in ways our community has yet to fully understand. We make four proposals for reflexive inquiry that we believe will advance this understanding and ultimately help to foster research that better serves both theory and practice, while being less subject to the whims of industry fashion

Viewing Systems as Services: A Fresh Approach in the IS Field

Despite wide agreement that we are in a service-dominated economy, there has been little movement toward treating service and service metaphors as core aspects of the IS field. This tutorial proposes that viewing systems as services is a potentially fruitful but generally unexplored approach for thinking about systems in organizations, systems analysis, and numerous applications of IT. An extension of past research in several areas, viewing systems as services proves to be an umbrella for developing new systems analysis and design methods, improving business/IT communication, and finding practical paths toward greater relevance and significance in business and society

The role of digital infrastructures in performances of organizational agility

Organizational agility has received much attention from practitioners and researchers in Information Systems. Existing research on agility, however, often conceptualizes information systems in a traditional way, while not reflecting sufficiently on how, as a consequence of digitalization, they are turning into open systems defined by characteristics like modularity and generativity. The concept of digital infrastructures captures this shift and stresses the evolving, socio-technical nature of such systems. This thesis sees IT in large companies as digital infrastructures and organizational agility as a performance within them. In order to explain how such infrastructures can support performances of agility, a focus on the interactions between IT, information and the people using and designing them is proposed. A case study was conducted within Telco, a large telecommunications firm in the United Kingdom. It presents three projects employees regarded as agile. A critical realist ontology is applied in order to identify generative mechanisms for agility. The thesis develops a theory of agility as a performance within digital infrastructures. This contains the central generative mechanism of agilization – making an organization more agile by cultivating digital infrastructures and minding flows of information to attain an appropriate level of agility. This is supported by the related mechanisms of informatization and infrastructuralization. Moreover, the concept of bounded agility illustrates how people in large organizations do not strive for agility unreservedly, instead aiming for agility in well-defined areas that does not put the business at risk. This theory of agility and the concept of bounded agility constitute the main theoretical contributions of this thesis. It also contributes clear definitions of the terms ‘information’ and ‘data’ and aligns them to the ontology of critical realism. Finally, the proposed mechanisms contribute to an emerging middle range theory of organizational agility that will be useful for practitioners