[AISWorld] From Influential Papers to Influential Ideas - The Discourse Continues - Part 2

[Samir Chatterjee]

Dear IS Colleagues:

My simple query on ISWorld has generated passionate debates on all sides.
It is clear to me that like myself, many scholars (seniors and juniors) are
concerned about the status quo when it comes to IS research. I have
received many direct responses sent only to me and many of you have said
your comments publicly. A number of different (but related) issues have
come up. I don’t think my intention was to address all of them. In fact
while I appreciate the public discourse, I am a man of action and would
like to make progress.


I will briefly share a comment that a colleague has made privately to me.


“It takes a lot of conviction to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
This should have been done a long time ago, many thanks for doing it. I
have seen even people with technical training dive into behavioral work as
if that's where the gold lies.” If IS research has had low value and
contribution to society let us address that and may be take steps to
rectify the situation so that our next generation scholars can be proud of
our legacy.


I know that we publish for mutual admiration, we all want to pat our backs,
and we have created an academic culture where research is evaluated by bean
counting, that is, how many hits we have in an obscure basket. Of course
there are promotion and tenure issues and business schools in particular
are obsessed with rankings. However, we all should take note of the fact
that our research should provide value and hopefully societal benefits.


That brings me to a question that has been raised: “How do we measure
influence or impact?”


I can think of numerous variables that can be combined to create a score
for influence. Some obvious variables would include citation count,
patents, funding from national agencies, commercialization, actual
end-users testimony etc etc. I do not want to come up with a formulae here.
But I definitely feel that a panel on this topic should be held at ICIS or
some other major AIS conference where we can hear from many scholars
worldwide.

A colleague mentioned: “Quite how they will measure impact remains to be
seen, but I suspect that mere citations will be insufficient. Instead, they
will look for (even if not find) evidence that the said research has made a
difference. This has been the call from Geoff Walsham (2012) for some time
- to use IS to make the world a better place. Studies of Green IS, where
the real beneficiary is the Planet Earth, should be framed by this ambit,
for instance.

Walsham, G. (2012). Are we making a better world with ICTs? Reflections on
a future agenda for the IS field. *Journal of Information Technology*, *27*(2),
87-93.”

I also agree that collectively as an academic community we should not worry
about what journal the paper is in.  But we must list highly influential
and cited papers regardless of the journal. The problem with FT-45 or if
you consider IS from an economics or social science perspective is that you
leave out some of the very best people who work on the border e.g. software
engineering or data analytics. We are increasingly noting that when new
position openings are announced, institutions want people who can teach
programming, do low-level systems development, but are supposed to have a
track record in (and only in) behavioristic journals. These are conflicting
demands.


The language we use in our IS research, the fact that we are publishing
"more and more about less and less" – and as others have observed, that the
publish-or-perish dynamic has gone out of control are all relevant issues
but I don’t think we should lump them into the effort to create a set of
influential papers or ideas list.


I agree with Juhani that individual papers may not be the right unit when
one considers the practical relevance of research. Perhaps we should focus
on ideas (innovations) and their histories.


Identifying innovations that can clearly be attributed to IS research is
challenging because of the heavy dominance of "the behavioral science
research" orientation of mainstream IS research during the last 30 years.


The acceptance of Design Science as a research methodology was a welcome
change in the community. But many of us now agree that we are still talking
about the philosophy of DSR rather than doing it. The reason is that top
journals keep rejecting relevant and interesting papers sighting lack of
theory contribution. The world is changing but our editors are not. The
more we do that, the less likely we are going to have an impact or
influence to society.

Lastly I want to mention that I am very cognizant that research has two
ends: basic (deep knowledge which is foundational) and applied (one that
industry excels in by creating applications). But let us not kid ourselves
into believing that IS is a fundamental science field. It is highly applied
and we should be proud of it.


In conclusion I would mention that while many people responded, I hardly
received any papers that one could argue has had influence and was
originated by IS community.

One colleague brought out a paper. “To my knowledge one of the most
influential contributions from IS research has been the business model
canvas, presented in the Business Model Generation book by Osterwalder &
Pigneur (2010). This relatively simple yet effective idea has been adopted
in start-up business circles everywhere. Osterwalder & Pigneur published
their research in CAIS in 2005, and in JAIS in 2013.

Osterwalder, A., & Pigneur, Y. (2013). Designing Business Models and
Similar Strategic Objects: The Contribution of IS. Journal of the
Association for Information Systems, 14(5), 237-244.
Osterwalder, A., Pigneur, Y., & Tucci, C. L. (2005). Clarifying Business
Models: Origins, Present, and Future of the Concept. Communications of the
Association for Information Systems, 16.”


I am going to start a Wiki Page with some important IS contributions. We
may have to debate how we measure influence. I am willing to participate.
Are you?

Samir

-- 
Dr. Samir Chatterjee
Professor
School of Information Systems & Technology
Claremont Graduate University
130 East 9th Street, Claremont, CA 91711
(P) 909-607-4651; (cell) 909-730-8898
profsamir1 at gmail.com
http://sites.cgu.edu/chatterjees/
Director, *Innovations Design Empowerment Applications Laboratory* (IDEA
Labs) http://www.idea-labs.net/
Associate Editor: Health Systems, IJBDCN
Editorial Board: Journal of AIS
Member: IEEE (senior), ACM (senior), AIS, AMIA
Author: http://designscienceresearch.wordpress.com/about/
2015 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner for Contributions to Design Science
(by AIS DSR community)