Balancing Rigor and Relevance in IS Research: Strategies, Tactics, and Recommendations

With the advent of the digital economy, firms are increasingly relying on information technologies for shaping their business strategies, organization capabilities, structures, and processes, and relationships with their business partners. Disruptions in the traditional means of competition and the use of information technologies for creating new business strategies and customer relationships imply that tremendous uncertainty exists about the best means for utilizing IT to shape effective managerial practice. Therefore, a considerable opportunity exists for IS academics to contribute to, and shape, IT management practice. Yet, the history of prior contributions by IS researchers toward being relevant to practice has been questioned by several prominent researchers (see the March, 1999 issue of MIS Quarterly for a variety of commentaries). While IS researchers have been acknowledged to have improved the rigor of their research, the grades for contributions to practice have been uneven. However, several IS researchers have adopted research strategies and philosophies that balance rigor and relevance in their research programs. Such research often starts with issues that are grounded in the domain of contemporary management practice or out of an anticipation of the future IT-shaped management practice. Such research also brings rigor to bear in the form of connections with theory, application of scientific and proven research methodologies, and creative application of the scientific methodology in analysis and interpretation of the findings. Finally, such researchers collaborate with practicing managers in developing interpretations of their findings and in developing guidelines that are likely to be valued by IS managers and applied in practice. Few researchers have succeeded in shaping their careers and research programs that balance rigor and relevance. Designing and executing such research programs is challenging. Few scholars acknowledge the challenges in balancing attention to the two, or, more importantly, share strategies and tactics for shaping such research projects. This panel brings together a group of researchers from North America and Europe who have significant experience in practice-oriented research and have made valuable contributions to both IS practice and academic journals out of their research. The panelists will address the following questions: 1. What are the challenges in balancing rigor and relevance? 2. What is the researchers’ personal philosophy and motivation for balancing rigor and relevance? 3. What strategies and tactics have they adopted? 4. What lessons have been learned through their experiences in balancing rigor and relevance

Organizational Competencies for Managing Investments in Visionary Applications of Information Technology

Despite the noted potential of information technology (IT) for enhancing organizational effectiveness (Boynton and Victor 1991; Venkatraman 1991), few fm-ns seem to have achieved consistent success in deploying IT in ways that fundamentally alter industry practices or existing work processes associated with value chain activities and customer interactions (McKenney 1995). Prior IS research has focused attention on the impacts and organizational drivers associated with strategic applications of IT (Sabherwal and King 1995). The main objective of such applications is the seizing of competitive advantage in the marketplace. The focus of this researchisuponapplicationsoflTthatarebroaderinorganizationalscope: whiletheirultimategoalmightbetheattainmentofmarket advantages, their immediate focus might be on the enhancement of business competence with respect to managerial decision-making, customer service, manufacturing management, or launching of a variety of value-added products and services. In order to distinguish such strategic applications of IT, we term them as visionary applications of IT. We consider them to be different from strategic applicationsoflTintworespects: (i)whilevisionaryapplicationsareaimedattheaugmentationofbusinesscompetencies,strategic applications are often targeted on exploiting market or competitive advantage opportunities and (ii) visionary applications are usually driven by the visionary insight of a senior business executive and exhibit an enterprise-wide flavor in their implementation scope, whereas strategic applications often arise in business units and are restricted to a specific market or business in their implementation scope

Creating Business Value Through Information Technology: The Effects of Chief Information Officer and Top Management Team Characteristics

In this research, we examined the effects of (1) business-related and strategic IT-related knowledge of the chief information officer (CIO) and the top management team (TMT) and (2) engagements between the CIO and members of the top management team on firms’ success in using information technology (IT) to support their business strategies and value-chain activities. Using a cross-sectional field study of 169 companies, our research found that CIOs with high strategic IT and business-related knowledge enjoyed significantly greater participation in top management teams. Further, CIO’s strategic IT and business knowledge and their participation in top management teams influenced their firms’ extent of IT deployment in business strategies and value-chain activities. The strength of these relationships was most prominent where firms viewed information technology’s role as fundamentally transforming their business processes or industry structure. Further, interestingly, we found no direct impact of the top management team’s IT knowledge or reporting relationship of the CIO with the CEO on the firms’ extent of IT deployment

The Effects of Knowledge Embeddedness on the Diffusion of Case Technologies within Organizations

Systems development in organizations is well recognized as a knowledge-intensive effort. Since the relevant application domain knowledge is thinly spread across an organization, the acquisition, sharing, and integration of knowledge are significant activities during the development process. Advocates of computer-aided software engineering tools (CASE) claim that these tools offer a potentially valuable feature/\u27or facilitating such knowledge integration and management activities: the central repository\u27, which is a location for storing, retrieving, and maintaining a variety of applications development information. Yet, the effects of the CASE repository on the diffusion of the technology have received limited attention in prior research. This study exmnines whether the embedding ofapplications developmentknowledge withintheCASErepositoryinfluencesthediffusionoftheCASE technologyacross apphcations projects in organizations. We develop a consmmt called knowledge embeddedness, which refers to the extent to which relevant applications development knowledge is systematically populated within the CASE repository. Based on data gathered from 168 organizations, through a large-sample survey of CASE user groups, we found strong support for the relationship between kalowledge embeddedness and diffusion of CASE technology. These results have interesting implications for future research and practice

The Antecedents of Information Systems Development Capability in Firms: A Knowledge Integration Perspective

The linkages between IS and business units are recognized as being critical to information systems development processes and outcomes. Previous research has found that they are associated with better performing ISD teams, stronger alignment between firms’ IT investments and business objectives, and comparatively superior exploitation of information technologies for business ends. What remains lacking in this stream is a coherent theoretical explanation for why and how the linkages between the IS unit and business units in a firm influence ISD processes and outcomes. This study draws on strength-of-ties theory to develop and test a project-level model that links both structural and cognitive IS-business linkages to ISD outcomes and processes. The key premise of this model is that IS-business linkages influence ISD primarily by facilitating integration of business and technical knowledge dispersed across internal business functions and outside the formal boundaries of the firm during the ISD process. Such integration of internal and external knowledge in turn influences ISD processes and outcomes. We tested the model using data on 133 projects collected from CIOs and client-side managers in 133 firms. Our results provide strong support for the hypothesized model

Organizational Innovation with Information Technologies: The Cycle of Adoption, Adaptation, and Use

Organizational innovation with information technologies encompasses a complex sequence of activities for the adoption, adaptation, and use of the technologies involved. While there has been research conducted on the adoption, adaptation, and use of information technologies over the past two decades, a review of over 60 empirical studies revealed several gaps in the literature. This paper discusses these gaps and proposes a conceptual framework for the future study of adoption, adaptation, and use of information technologies. Based upon this framework, several propositions for future study are suggested