REVISITING THE PROBLEM OF THE PROBLEM – AN ONTOLOGY AND FRAMEWORK FOR PROBLEM ASSESSMENT IN IS RESEARCH

Abstract

A comprehensive understanding of how to achieve relevance and practical impact with our work remains elusive within the information systems (IS) community. While we know that finding or constructing important research problems sets the bar for the potential impact that research can have, we know little about how to support research problem assessment and selection in practice. This paper address this gap by presenting the problem assessment framework (PAF) and outlining its application for the assessment, selection, and justification of important research problems. The PAF builds on the problem assessment ontology, which explicates the domain of problem assessment based on a synthesis of extant research. We have instantiated the PAF in the problem assessment canvas to make it more accessible. Altogether, we contribute three novel artifacts that support researchers looking to work on the most important research problems as the basis for more relevant and impactful IS research