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

Wed Jul 20 09:45:49 EDT 2016

Dear Samir:

You are doing great service to the IS community.  Thank you.

The worldwide IS community is expressing its concerns about the contents and direction of IS Research.  

It is the Theory versus Practice debate.  
It is the Rigor versus Relevance debate.

As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of IT Case and Application Research (JITCAR) since its inception in 1999 for 9 years and again since 2014 -- JITCAR has published two Editorial Preface Articles in its two issues devoted to the above debate of rigor versus relevance.  First one was in the very first issue of 1999.  Second one was by Dr. Steve Gordon in January, 2008 in his capacity as the EIC for three years -- 2008-2010.   Dr. Suprateek Sarker was the EIC during 2011-2013.

What have been our contributions since early 1970s in these areas?
Impact Factors, Number of Citations, Senior Scholars' Basket of Journals all are esoteric measures of our success.

We have had almost six to seven generations of computer era.  How have the innovations of these generations been impacted directly or indirectly by our research?

I'd like this debate to continue.  May be we should have a half day plenary session at the next AMCIS conference devoted to this debate.  After all it is for the survival and sustenance of our discipline.

Sincerely

Dr. Shailendra Palvia
Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar for 2016-17
Professor of MIS, College of Management
Long Island University Post, Brookville, NY 11801.
http://liu.edu/CWPost/Academics/Faculty/Faculty/P/Shailendra-Palvia?rn=Faculty+Profiles&ru=/CWPost/Academics/Faculty/Faculty
Phone #: 732-983-7034

-----Original Message-----
From: AISWorld [mailto:aisworld-bounces at lists.aisnet.org] On Behalf Of Samir Chatterjee
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2016 1:34 AM
To: ISWorld
Subject: [AISWorld] From Influential Papers to Influential Ideas - The Discourse Continues - Part 2

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) _______________________________________________
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