Bichler, Martin

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BISE – EDITORIALReflections on the State of DesignScience ResearchThe AuthorProf. Dr. Martin Bichler ()Decision Sciences & SystemsInstitut für InformatikTU MünchenBoltzmannstraße 385748 MünchenGermanybichler@in.tum.dePublished online: 2014-02-12This article is also available in Ger-man in print and via http://www.wirtschaftsinformatik.de: Bichler M(2014) Design-Science: Eindrücke vonder ICIS 2013. WIRTSCHAFTSINFOR-MATIK. doi: 10.1007/s11576-014-0410-x.© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden2014DOI 10.1007/s12599-014-0317-5At the time of writing this editorial, ICIS 2013 in beautiful Milan has just come toan end. I want to take the opportunity to reflect on the conference, before I brieflyintroduce the papers in this issue.For many colleagues in our community ICIS is the primary meeting every year andit attracted a record number of 1537 registered attendees in 2013. For the US Americanbusiness schools, ICIS serves as a job market and many new PhD students had inter-views with faculty members during the conference. The conference spans an amazingbreadth of topics and methods including, but not limited to, qualitative, quantitative,and design research. As 10 years have now gone by since the seminal article “Design sci-ence in information systems research” by Hevner et al. was published in MIS Quarterly(with more than 4600 citations now), it is interesting to look at the conference from adesign science perspective.The conference started with the ICIS Doctoral Consortium as a pre-conference eventand the presentations can be seen as a sample from which one can estimate which meth-ods young academics in IS employ. I should mention that the majority of the 40 studentparticipants were from US universities and that this is not necessarily representative forthe rest of the world. Many of the students collected data sets from various online sitesincluding online job markets, financial portals, or crowd-funding platforms and ana-lyzed user behavior or project success. Applied econometrics played a central role inmost of these presentations, design research however did not. Depending on the focusof the site analyzed, there was a close connection to labor economics, finance, market-ing, or other areas in business. Also, in the program of the main conference quantitativeand qualitative methods seemed to outnumber design research by far. Overall, after 10years of discussion about design science in IS, the number of design science papers wasstill comparatively small in both the Doctoral Consortium and the ICIS conference.This should not be seen as criticism towards research that is not design-oriented.Actually, many of the presentations in the Doctoral Consortium and also in the mainconference revealed very interesting insights into the online behavior of users or groupsof users. I am absolutely convinced that we need to analyze information systems froman economic as well as from a behavioral point of view and that some of the respectivequestions will even gain importance in our digital world. It is hard for me to even imag-ine IS nowadays without areas such as Economics of IS or Information and KnowledgeManagement.However, I also believe that it would have substantial consequences if we gave upon design research. First, this would impact teaching. If we do not design systems inour research there will be lower incentives but also less expertise to teach topics suchas systems design and development. Actually, many PhD students I talked to at theDoctoral Consortium had virtually no experience in information systems development.Much of the demand for IS students in the industry is driven by the fact that alumnihave skills in information systems design and development as well.Second, we would lose a competitive advantage of IS research over other fields inbusiness and economics. Marketing colleagues also look at user behavior in onlineshops and colleagues in finance collect data from online investment sites and analyzeonline investment decisions. This is not to say that we should not do so, but a defin-ing feature of much successful IS research has long been that we also designed systemsthat we then analyzed. In the analysis of design artifacts, lab experiments, field studies,econometrics, but also qualitative methods all play a role and they actually make theresearch distinct in comparison to what is typically done in most areas of business andeconomics. In contrast to much research in computer science, good design research inIS has the advantage of being well grounded in the social sciences. The evaluation of theimpact of newly designed artifacts on individuals, groups, and organizations stands outin the methods employed, but also in the understanding of the application domain. Ofcourse, design research needs to contribute new knowledge in a field, beyond solving areal-world problem. It would be a pity if we lost this ability to design and to evaluateBusiness & Information Systems Engineering 2|2014 71BISE – EDITORIALat a time when this skill set is most needed. Apart from this, helping design the futuredigital economy is a wonderful opportunity for young academics to make a difference.Among the many other pre- or post-ICIS workshops, WITS (Workshop on Informa-tion Technology and Systems) traditionally has a focus on design research with sessionson data and text mining, social analytics, systems optimization, and recommender sys-tems. Paulo Goes, the Editor-in-Chief of MIS Quarterly, gave a keynote with the title“Looking for Design Science Research in Top-Tier IS Journals. Has anyone seen it?” Hereported that only about 5% of the submissions to MIS Quarterly are actually designscience papers and that the segment has, as of yet, not been growing in MIS Quarterlyat the speed expected 10 years ago. He called the community for action and advocatedthat the journal is very open to design-oriented papers with several new editors witha respective background. Of course, most departments at BISE are also very receptivetowards design research.Many design projects originate out of joint projects with industry practitioners. Apartfrom their academic appeal, good IS design research projects often have a substantialimpact on real-world business processes. This is an important contribution of IS tothe society, however, there has often been little recognition of these achievements inacademia. In 2008, the INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) initiated the ISSDesign Science Award (http://mis.eller.arizona.edu/events/informs/winners/index.asp).This year, the BISE journal will co-sponsor the ISS Design Science Award. Several sub-communities and departments in Business and Information Systems Engineering areprimarily design-oriented, and it is fair to say that the European IS community withits engineering history actively practiced design research long before the MIS Quarterlyarticle was published. I would like to encourage all of you, who have completed inter-esting projects with industry partners and a tangible impact on business practice, tosubmit proposals.Let me now provide you with a brief guide of the articles in this issue. The first threearticles were submitted as a response to the call for research areas in Business and Infor-mation Systems Engineering. The paper “Social Knowledge Environments” by MarkusBick et al. describes strategies, management, and processes, utilizing social software sys-tems and tools to enhance knowledge management, and outlines research opportunitiesin this area. Böhmann et al. outline “Service Systems Engineering” as the systematic de-sign and development of service systems. They suggest design research as well as actionresearch as appropriate approaches leading to innovation in service systems. Finally, thepaper “Social Media Analytics” by Stieglitz et al. provides another look at social mediaand various methods such as text mining, social network analysis, and trend analysis,which allow researchers, but also businesses, to understand customer behavior.A state-of-the-art article by Diebold et al. discusses “Course Allocation and StableMatching”. The paper has a long history and started out in early 2012 with a projectaimed at evaluating stable matching algorithms for assignment problems in a univer-sity context. The Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 2012 was then awarded to LloydShapley and Alvin Roth for their work on stable matching, which made this line of re-search much more prominent. In spite of its popularity more recently, there is still littleempirical research. In addition to an up-do-date literature survey, the paper providesresults of field studies which allow decision makers to better understand the trade-offsbetween stable matching mechanisms and simple first-come, first-serve assignments asthey are typically used for course allocation.Finally, Torsten Eymann, Dennis Kundisch, and Jan Recker collected contributionsfrom six German-speaking academics, who spent a considerable part of their careerin institutions in the United States or in Australia. The contributions discuss individ-ual experiences abroad, but also after returning to Europe. I found the collection veryinteresting and delightful to read and hope you will share my opinion.72 Business & Information Systems Engineering 2|2014

Reflections on the State of Design Science Research

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Reflections on the State of Design Science Research

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