[AISWorld] Publicize your current AIS Journal paper: InPractice

[Galletta, Dennis]

Dear colleague,

We are happy to introduce a new feature called "InPractice" for the AIS and SIM communities, available at https://aisnet.org/blogpost/1706903/AIS-InPractice. The monthly newsletter/feature/blog will summarize, in two or three paragraphs, the practice implications of research published in AIS journals (JAIS, CAIS, PAJAIS, AIS THCI, TRR, and MISQE). This feature can help all members to catch up on research that has significant practice implications, although practitioner members and student members are in the "sweet spot" of the intended audience.

For any AIS journal authors out there reading this email, please send me an entry to publicize your recent paper (i.e., in the past 6 months) to the practitioner community. Please follow the template of the current issue: List the takeaways in a bulleted list and summarize the paper. We will post these short descriptions each month and send an alert to all practitioner and student members so they are aware of your work.

We believe it could enhance practitioners' professional careers and build closer ties to us academic members. We especially hope that student members will find this resource valuable enough that they might be more likely to continue as practitioner members after they graduate.

Therefore, please point your student members and practitioners with whom you have close ties to InPractice at the above address, so they can see the first "issue" of the newsletter. For at least this first year, the newsletter will be free and open.

A bit of history might help you understand why we created this newsletter. The most recent Senior Scholar panel at ICIS in San Francisco in December 2018 was entitled "If Practice Makes Perfect, Where do we Stand?" This panel examined the issue of the surprisingly small number of practitioners who join AIS and attend our conferences, relative to all other business fields. The panel report, published in CAIS in July, provided a vigorous debate about the causes and effects of this vacuum. Panelists included Niels Bjorn-Anderson, Dorothy Leidner, M. Lynne Markus, Ephraim R. McLean, Detmar Straub, and James Wetherbe. You can see the panel report at https://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol45/iss1/3/.

Please note, however, that the estimate of the number of AIS practitioner members was too low in the panel report. The actual number is 65 as of August, 2019, out of 4,601 members overall. So rather than 0.1%, a more accurate percentage is 1.4% of our total membership is represented by practitioners, still the lowest of all of the business fields represented in Table 1. Likewise, Table 2 reported the estimated number of practitioners who attended ICIS at 0.3%. The actual numbers are as follows: In 2016, 8 out of 1,442 attendees were practitioners. In 2017, it was 4 out of 1,172. And finally, in 2018, 7 out of 1,541 paid attendees were practitioners, which is a half of one percent if you round up, still the lowest of all business fields.

For the time being, I am serving as the Editor of the newsletter, but in the future I hope to pass this off to quarterly or annual guest editors. If you'd like to serve as a guest editor, who would receive, edit, and on a monthly basis, post edited submissions from those who just published their papers, please let me know. I believe serving in this capacity for a brief time could be rewarding in terms of visibility in both the practitioner and researcher community.

Some have told me that we academics do not have the skills to write effective practitioner summaries, but I am optimistic that we can reach out effectively to the practitioner community if we set our minds on the task. Please briefly assess and write a short list of the main practice "takeaways" and then summarize the study itself in a single short paragraph, and submit it to me at this email address. We will update the blog at the end of each month.

Over time, the scope and target for this newsletter might evolve, so please help us to expand our collection of bridges to practitioners. I thank the Senior Scholars, former AIS VP of Publications Carol Saunders, AIS Executive Director Matt Nelson, and AIS President Alan Dennis, for their encouragement and help in this new endeavor.

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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