Baskerville, Richard

Winter, Robert

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BISE – EDITORIALScience of Business & InformationSystems EngineeringThe AuthorsProf. Dr. Robert Winter ()Institute of InformationManagementUniversity of St. GallenMüller-Friedberg-Strasse 89000 St. GallenSwitzerlandRobert.Winter@unisg.chProf. Dr. Richard BaskervilleGeorgia State UniversityAtlantaUSABaskerville@acm.orgPublished online: 2010-08-25This article is also available in Ger-man in print and via http://www.wirtschaftsinformatik.de: Winter R,Baskerville R (2010) Methodik derWirtschaftsinformatik.WIRTSCHAFTS-INFORMATIK. doi: 10.1007/s11576-010-0242-2.© Gabler Verlag 2010DOI 10.1007/s12599-010-0123-7Design science research is the dominant IS research paradigm in the German-speakingcountries. A large number of design-oriented researchers can also be found in other,mostly European, IS research communities. Design science research aims at prescriptivelearning, i.e. the design and evaluation of innovative, useful, generic problem solutionsto important and relevant design problems in organizations. This aim contrasts behav-ioral IS research that aims at descriptive learning, i.e. the exploration and validation ofcausal, explanatory, and/or predictive relations between existing IS phenomena.Both behavioral research and design science research are paralleled by “meta” re-search. Meta research regards how such social sciences reflect the respective processes,products, roles, etc. This reflection provides guidance for researchers and specifies rigorin the respective approach. Both behavioral research and design science research aimat combining rigor and relevance. In behavioral IS research that is quantitative, met-rics such as statistical significance are established as clear and common measures of therigor in the results, but the relevance of these results is sometimes poor. In contrast,utility for practice is established as a clear and common measure of the relevance of de-sign science research results, but the construction and evaluation rigor of these resultsis sometimes poor.Business and information systems engineering addresses a wide range of techno-economical issues, and thus behavioral research as well as design science research.Regardless of the research approach, business and information systems engineeringshould be both rigorously conducted and relevant to business practice. From that view-point, the rigor of design science research for IS is therefore an important issue. Therigor of design science research has been less well-defined and consequently less com-monly accepted than the well expressed and widely accepted rigor in behavioral IS re-search. While numerous contributions have been made to the justification of design,the typology of artifacts, or specific problem solutions, rigor-related aspects are notsufficiently standardized across the design-oriented research community. One exampleis the lack of any commonly accepted reference process model. Another example is thedebate on the positioning and character of design theories. Although the IS communityagrees in general that information systems are comprised of organizational (human) aswell as technical (software) components, it is argued whether “pure” organizational ar-tifacts are acceptable outcomes or whether only IT-related artifacts are allowed results.Yet another example for the need to improve rigor in design science research is the lackof commonly accepted, specific evaluation guidelines for different artifact types.This special issue is devoted to the rigor of the design and engineering of IS artifacts.The call for papers was distributed both through BISE/WI channels and internationalmailing lists. Interested authors were invited to submit abstracts of their publicationprojects and to present and discuss their projects at a one-day workshop in St. Gallenin September 2009. This workshop was attended by ten experienced professors andnine author teams. Fifteen submissions were received by the December 2009 deadline,of which 13 were accepted for review. After the first round of reviews, authors of eightsubmissions were invited to revise and resubmit. After the second round of reviews,one paper was conditionally accepted and four were invited for revision and resubmis-sion. In the third and final round of reviews one paper was accepted and three wereconditionally accepted. Overall there were a total of four accepted papers.We are particularly pleased that this special issue’s BISE interview fits our topic per-fectly. Jay F. Nunamaker, one of the “founding fathers” of the IS discipline in the UnitedStates of America, answers Robert Winter’s questions on the direction of the IS disci-pline, on rigor and publication issues in design-oriented research, as well as on researchorganization and financing.Due to space limitations, only three of the four accepted papers can be published inthis special issue:Baskerville and Pries-Heje contribute to the design theory discussion by proposingthe focused and simplified concept of an explanatory design theory which relates re-Business & Information Systems Engineering 5|2010 269BISE – EDITORIALquirements and (solution) components for a design problem. They illustrate their pro-posal by two sets of examples, one from design disciplines in general and one from ISresearch.Offermann, Blom, Levina and Bub build on the state-of-the-art of the design theorydiscussion and propose a specific design theory for methods. For each design theorycomponent, they derive evaluation criteria and present examples of method publica-tions fulfilling the criteria.Österle and Otto propose a method for Consortium Research, which is supposed tofacilitate multilateral collaboration of researchers and practitioners during the researchprocess. The method’s design is based on a self-evaluating design process which wascarried out over a period of 20 years.The fourth paper will be published in issue 6/2010: Fettke, Houy and Loos focuson the role of design knowledge in business and information systems engineering.They show that design knowledge is often neglected in design research and they pro-pose foundations to systematically create, validate and reuse design knowledge. Theydemonstrate their proposal’s utility by exemplarily using the event-driven process chain(EPC) technique.This special issue would not be possible without a lot of hard work by many scholarsaround the world. We wish to thank all authors, all presenters and discussants at theworkshop, and in particular all reviewers – both German-speaking and international –for their dedicated efforts in making this special issue a success.Robert WinterRichard Baskerville270 Business & Information Systems Engineering 5|2010

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