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

Editorial

Editorial for the issue

Educating Students in Healthcare Information Technology: IS Community Barriers, Challenges, and Paths Forward

Healthcare information technology (HIT) is an exciting field to which information systems (IS) scholars have much to contribute. As the IS community continues to tackle enrollment and growth issues across the nation, HIT becomes an attractive topic for the IS educators to embrace. Careful consideration and domain understanding are needed to ensure a suitable depth and balance in curricula. The intent of this article is to provide guidance to the IS community to support and promote successful HIT educational courses and programs by investigating three important questions: (1) Does IS have a role in HIT? (2) Where does an IS educator look to begin with HIT education? (3) How do IS educators frame their vision for HIT curricula leveraging the discipline’s strengths? Our hope is that this article will illuminate HIT curriculum matters for the general IS faculty and generate purposeful debate regarding how best to position HIT education within the IS discipline if IS faculty want to join in the quest to successfully educate and place graduates in the growing health technology sector

Focus groups and critical social IS research: How the choice of method can promote emancipation of respondents and researchers

Critical social research in information systems has been gaining prominence for some time and is increasingly viewed as a valid research approach. One problem of the critical tradition is that there is a lack of empirical research. A contributing factor to this gap in the literature is the lack of agreement on what constitutes appropriate methodologies for critical research. The present paper contributes to this debate by outlining the role that focus group research can play in the critical approach. The paper outlines the main characteristics of critical research with an emphasis on its emancipatory faculties. It then goes on to review the focus group method in general and gives an account of two research projects that used focus groups as a method of data collection. It is argued that focus groups can contribute to emancipation of researchers as well as respondents. This argument is built upon the critical theories of the two most prominent theorists currently relied upon in critical social IS research, namely Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault. Focus groups can improve communication and move real discourses closer to the Habermas\u27s ideas speech situation. At the same time, they can contribute to the challenging of prevailing orthodoxy and thereby overcome established regimes of truth in the Foucauldian tradition. The paper ends with a critical reflection of the shortcomings of focus groups as a critical method and of the specific approach chosen in this paper

Basic Classes in Conceptual Modeling: Theory and Practical Guidelines

Since the 1970s, many approaches to representing domains have been suggested. Each approach maintains the assumption that the information about the objects represented in the information system (IS) is specified and verified by domain experts and potential users. Yet, as more IS are developed to support a larger diversity of users such as customers, suppliers, and members of the general public (e.g., in the case of many multiuser online systems), analysts can no longer rely on a stable single group of people for the complete specification of domains; therefore, prior research has questioned the efficacy of conceptual modeling in these heterogeneous settings. This paper aims to address this problem by providing theoretical foundations rooted in psychology research supporting the existence and importance of special classes that are termed basic-level categories. Based on this research, we formulate principles for identifying basic classes in a domain. These classes can guide conceptual modeling, database design, and user interface development in a wide variety of traditional and emergent domains

Focus Groups for Artifact Refinement and Evaluation in Design Research

Focus groups to investigate new ideas are widely used in many research fields. The use of focus groups in design research poses interesting opportunities and challenges. Traditional focus group methods must be adapted to meet two specific goals of design research. For the refinement of an artifact design, exploratory focus groups (EFGs) study the artifact to propose improvements in the design. The cycle of build and evaluate using EFGs continues until the artifact is released for field test in the application environment. Then, the field test of the design artifact may employ confirmatory focus groups (CFGs) to establish the utility of the artifact in field use. Rigorous investigation of the artifact requires multiple CFGs to be run with opportunities for quantitative and qualitative data collection and analyses across the multiple CFGs. In this paper, we discuss the adaptation of focus groups to design research projects. We demonstrate the use of both EFGs and CFGs in a design research project in the health care field

Exploratory Content Analysis Using Text Data Mining: Corporate Citizenship Reports of Seven US Companes from 2004 to 2012

This study demonstrates the use of Text Data Mining (TDM) for exploring the content of a collection of Corporate Citizenship(CC) reports. The collection analyzed comprises CC reports produced by seven Dow Jones companies (Citi, Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil, General Motors, Intel, McDonalds and Microsoft) in2004, 2008 and 2012.Exploratory con-tent analysis using TDM enables insights for CC professionals and analysts, in less time using fewer resources, which in turn could help them explore collaboration opportunities around supply chains, re-training programs, and alternative risk mitigation strategies in terms of governance and compliance. In addition, TDM, using supervised machine learning on the whole collection (or corpus) as well as unsupervised machine learning on document collections by year, suggests the integration of CC considerations related to environmental sustain-ability in CC report components discussing the core business of some firms. This method has been used in many contexts in which a collection of documents needs to be categorized and/or analyzed to uncover new patterns and relationships

Evaluating Tenure Cases for Scholars Active in Emergent or Non-mainstream IS research topics

The number of topics and methods that our field is embracing is growing rapidly. This includes methodologies such as design science, analytics, neuro-IS and contextual areas such as healthcare IT or the public sector. This rapid expansion poses challenges for junior faculty engaged in this research, because external letter writers may struggle to understand how to evaluate their work. The outcomes of inquiry for these new methods or growing topics often vary from the “normal” metrics for productivity, such as journal publications, manifest in the broader IS discipline. How can we, as a field, develop a broader understanding of how to evaluate the tenure cases of individuals that use new methods or who investigate emerging topics? In this panel, we foster a conversation on how to, and if there is a need to, develop new metrics for evaluating tenure cases for scholars active in emergent or non-mainstream IS research topics