[AISWorld] Senior Scholars Panel at ICIS - last day last slot Nob Hill CD

[Galletta, Dennis]

Dear AIS/ICIS Community:

An ICIS Senior Scholars panel discussion might attract your attention this Sunday in San Francisco. In the last slot, from 11:00am to 12:30pm, you will find in Nob Hill C&D a panel discussion that is entitled: "If Practice Makes Perfect, Where do we Stand?" This is for us academics who sometimes wonder if the place we find ourselves right now is where we want to be after 50 years of research and teaching in our field.

I will act as moderator of the panel, which is composed of the following, in alphabetical order:

Niels Bjorn-Andersen, Copenhagen Business School
Dorothy Leidner, Baylor University
M. Lynne Markus, Bentley University
Ephraim R. McLean, Georgia State University
Detmar Straub, Georgia State University
James Wetherbe, Texas Tech University

The panel abstract is shown below, followed by an abstract of the statement each panelist provided.

One of the important early stepping stones to our field's present situation is the role of practitioners in our development. In the 1970s, our interaction with practitioners was close, with SIM members receiving copies of the MIS Quarterly, practitioners funding the ICIS Doctoral Consortium, and submissions receiving at least one practitioner review. Today, however, the gap between practitioners and researchers appears to have increased from those early days. Given that almost 50 years have passed since then, which crossed both a new century and new millennium, this distinguished panel will provide several divergent points of view about that gap. Have we arrived at a comfortable distance? Is our relevance too low to expect practitioners to join AIS and attend our conferences? Is the gap too wide? The panelists will discuss issues related to these questions. Ample time will be allocated to questions and answers from the audience.

The six distinguished panelists have shared with each other a set of position statements that will later serve as a submission to CAIS. But for now, let's use these short descriptions as appetizers. I list them in the approximate order in which they will speak about their main themes. I will introduce the panel with some statistics I found about practitioner involvement in other business fields. Then:

Eph McLean describes the history, from the standpoint of his being one of three founding Associate Editors of the MIS Quarterly. He reviews the clear and logical factors that led to the demise of our close association with the Society for Management Information Systems (SMIS), later renamed SIM (Society for Information Management). He describes that our field has had to fight hard to earn the same respect afforded to finance, economics, management science, and other fields. Deans and P&T committees likely will need to revisit their key performance indicators before we can expect to expand the impact of our research on practice.

Niels Bjorn-Andersen states that he is not worried at the lack of practitioners at our conferences, but that we do not attend practitioner conferences or publish in industry/trade magazines. He says that we are becoming a "tax on students and the working class" and their patience and pocketbooks are becoming thin. We are in danger that students and taxpayers will stop funding us. Niels reviews some initiatives that are ongoing and suggests several alternatives of greater feasibility.

Dorothy Leidner reviews the mission of AIS and finds that we have made great strides in academic leadership, but we have not become the premier professional association for practice. Practitioners seem to prefer to meet academics who are affiliated with elite schools, and academics seem to prefer to contact those practitioners in high places in highly visible firms. Dorothy provides a solution and road map for focusing more on our students as future practitioners.

James Wetherbe reports that typical tenure and promotion metrics of publications and citation counts are disconnected from what is valued in practice. Medical schools integrate research into practice using "translational research," which takes lab research to practitioners (Eckhardt and Wetherbe, 2014). Translational faculty are tenured professors who practice medicine and also work with practicing physicians on clinical initiatives and coauthored papers. Jim provides 5 specific recommended initiatives, with a caveat that change in universities is glacial in nature, but with optimism that applying strong scientific capabilities found in business schools will help speed up change.

M. Lynne Markus provides a provocative title "If you want to be loved, be lovable" (a quote from Ovid). She divides our field's issues into design and implementation and encourages us to test a hypothesis that our problem is one of design rather than implementation. Lynne will discuss implications of two practice-relevant research models, translational research (Eckhardt and Wetherbe, 2014) and policy research (Majchrzak and Markus, 2013), and where we should go from here.

Detmar Straub begins his statement of position with a quote from a famous mistaken barnyard fowl: "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" His position is that Chicken Little might be overstating the issues given 19 ways in which we do influence practice (an augmented list from Soon and Ang, 2011). His position is that not only is the sky perhaps not falling at all, but it is difficult to study the phenomenon of whether the sky is actually falling due to data collection problems.

After framing the issues, each speaker will, in alphabetical order, provide advice then the group will respond to questions from the audience.

References

Jonathan Eckhardt and James Wetherbe, Marking Business School Research More Relevant<https://hbr.org/2014/12/making-business-school-research-more-relevant>, HBR.org, December 2014
Majchrzak, A., & Markus, M. L. (2013). Methods for policy research: Taking socially responsible action (Vol. 3). SAGE publications.
Ovid, Ars Amatoria book II, line 107 (see https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ovid; date: earlier than 17AD.
Straub, D. and S. Ang (2011). "Rigor and Relevance in IS Research: Redefining the Debate and a Call for Future Research." MIS Quarterly 35(1): III-XI.

DG

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Dennis F. Galletta                      Professor of Business Administration
University of Pittsburgh                       Ben L. Fryrear Faculty Fellow
282a Mervis Hall                         and Director, Katz Doctoral Program
Phone +1 412-648-1699                       Katz Graduate School of Business
Fax +1 412-624-3633                                    Pittsburgh, PA  15260
E-mail: galletta @ pitt.edu                 homepage: www.pitt.edu/~galletta<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http:%2F%2Fwww.pitt.edu%2F~galletta&data=01%7C01%7Cgalletta%40katz.pitt.edu%7C6c38ed63ff2044c895ff08d59e9c6746%7C9ef9f489e0a04eeb87cc3a526112fd0d%7C1&sdata=mn%2FzK1thKeKZbxjEYBTPliXPQVEgsHl%2FsmrE3YU9V6g%3D&reserved=0>
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