Editorial Special Issue: Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology

The common understanding of design science research in information systems (DSRIS) continues to evolve. Only in the broadest terms has there been consensus: that DSRIS involves, in some way, learning through the act of building. However, what is to be built – the definition of the DSRIS artifact – and how it is to be built – the methodology of DSRIS – has drawn increasing discussion in recent years. The relationship of DSRIS to theory continues to make up a significant part of the discussion: how theory should inform DSRIS and whether or not DSRIS can or should be instrumental in developing and refining theory. In this paper, we present the exegesis of a DSRIS research project in which creating a (prescriptive) design theory through the process of developing and testing an information systems artifact is inextricably bound to the testing and refinement of its kernel theory.

While ethics are recognized as an integral part of information systems (IS) research, many questions about the role of ethics in research practice remain unanswered. Our report responds to this emerging set of concerns with a broad and integrative account of five perspectives on ethics in IS research and design science research (DSR) in particular. Our report is informed by a broad literature review, a panel discussion at DESRIST 2020, and substantial personal experience from wrestling with ethical considerations in the field. The report provides a comprehensive discussion of prevailing perspectives on ethics and the implications for IS research. Together, we hope the report will inspire more ethics-conscious and responsible IS research. © 2022 by the Association for Information Systems.

Since its inception, the Information Systems discipline has been striving to develop impactful papers that contribute to cumulative knowledge development. Yet, there is a surprising lack of insights on how scientific impact can be accomplished and to which extent this impact represents a substantial engagement with, and extension of the knowledge contributions of the original papers. Especially for review articles and design science research, there are both competing conceptions of what makes these papers impactful and a lack of empirical evidence that would inform this debate. Furthermore, there is a latent skepticism as to whether this sometimes staggering impact of review articles actually represents knowledge development. In a similar way, it is unclear how and to which extent design science research has stimulated meaningful, cumulative knowledge development in information systems. The goal of this thesis is therefore to (1) explain and to (2) distinguish the scientific impact of review articles and design science research. Specifically, the first goal considers overall scientific impact as the dependent variable whose association with antecedent factors is analyzed by regression methodologies. The second goal zooms in on the concept of scientific impact and considers it as a relation between citing and cited papers that is explored through methodologies of manual content analysis and machine learning classification. With Paper 1, I develop the foundation of knowledge development through review articles by crystallizing their contributions and aligning them with their underlying knowledge conversion processes in an overarching framework. This framework is based on the abstraction and codification of knowledge and thereby integrates two essential dimensions of knowledge development. Overall, the foundation developed in the first paper informs the underlying conception of knowledge development of both review articles and citing papers. Addressing the first goal, Papers 2 and 3 develop and test scientometric impact models explaining the scientific impact of review articles and design science research, respectively. Beyond common control variables related to the journal and author level, they offer distinct insights for each type of paper. For review articles, I identify strong effects related to methodological transparency and the development of a research agenda, which vary depending on the type of review. For design science research, I show that theorization and novelty drive scientific impact. Concerning the second goal, Papers 4 and 5 distinguish different types of scientific impact of review articles and design science research, respectively. To analyze the different types of impact that review articles have on their overwhelming number of citing papers, I develop machine learning classifiers. Specifically, I distinguish ideational impact, which corresponds to a substantial engagement with and development of the knowledge contributions of the review article, from perfunctory impact, which corresponds to more trivial connections to the review article. In a similar, though not automated way, I analyze the types of impact of information systems design theories, a particular type of design science research. These analyses primarily focus on whether follow-up research tests and extends these theories. Based on our content analysis, I identify an alarming paucity of follow-up research in this area and develop specific guidelines for the design science community to address this challenge. The thesis concludes with an overview of the research contributions, implications for research practice, future research opportunities, and final remarks.

About Our Authors

This paper arose from concerns regarding the current conceptualizations of ‘design’ in the emerging literature on design science (DS) in information systems (IS). In this paper, we argue that current conceptualizations of design in IS are overly narrow, which necessarily limits what is viewed as acceptable DS research. In response we advance a more encompassing view of design. The revised view extends the current perspectives of design in the IS literature to embrace broader conceptualizations of design, which are evident in many intellectual communities outside IS where design is viewed as a critical component of both research and practice - such as management, engineering, architecture and others. In addition to the fairly common conceptualizations of design as product and design as process or action, design is also conceived as: intention; planning - including modeling and representation; communication; user experience; value; professional practice; and as service. Further, whereas the current conceptualization of design in IS views IS design knowledge as split across two paradigms, namely DS and behavioral science, in this paper we argue for a broader and more integrated view of design: one that emphasizes both the construction-centered and human-centered aspects of design in IS. Building from our broader view, we discuss some of the implications for design-oriented research in IS, and consider ways in which this human- centered perspective might impact on the context and content of design research in IS.

This issue is the first of ISJ's 25th volume and, as is customary on such anniversaries, this editorial reflects on the life of the ISJ and on its future. The editors-in-chiefs have periodically analysed the nature of the papers that ISJ publishes, most recently in the valedictory editorial by David Avison and Guy Fitzgerald in volume 22 (Avison & Fitzgerald, 2012). This looked at papers in the first 21 volumes. Here we update this analysis by reflecting on the content in the last three volumes and consider how we need to develop the journal further. The last three volumes, 22-24, comprised 64 papers. ISJ has moved from four issues a year to six and the number of papers published in each volume has increased from around 17.3 to 21.3. The move to six issues a year was occasioned by increases in good quality submissions and a desire to ensure that the time between acceptance and publication was shorter. In these 64 papers, we see many of the publication trends identified in earlier papers exacerbated. The 64 papers were produced by 177 authors (some authors produced more than one paper, of course) with an average of 2.77 authors per paper. Remarkably, only 4 single authored papers were published (6.25%) cementing a decreasing trend of 32.4% single authored papers in volumes 1-17 and 13.6% in volumes 18-21. Papers with four authors are now quite common, and some have five or six. While single authored papers are often preferred by tenure and promotions committees, the trend in IS, or at least in the ISJ, is for multi-authored papers. ISJ is continuing to becoming more global, with the authors of papers more geographically diverse. Avison and Fitzgerald identified the reduction in UK papers in the ISJ, the plateauing of contributions from North America and the increases from Asia-Pacific. UK contributions in the most recent volumes have fallen from 16% to 14.2%. North American contributions drop from 40.8% to 36.7%, while Asia-Pacific authors now comprise 20.3% of the total (up from 18.9%) and Europe (excluding the UK) hosts 28.2% of contributors (up from 22.3%). Taken together, the increase in author numbers and their greater geographical spread means that more papers are co-authored by people from different geographical regions. Indeed, within regions there is a sense that co-authors work in different countries, and even within countries, co-authors are seldom co-located in the same institution – and where they are, they are often not in the same academic unit. Given the global nature of IS, and the multiple perspectives upon it that need to be brought to bear, this diversity appears healthy. In a different aspect of diversity, the gender balance of authors continues to become more even. 35% of the most recent paper authors are female, compared to 14.4% in volumes 1-6, 19.8% in volumes 13-17 and 28% in the volumes 18-21. As in the earlier analyses, virtually all the most recent authors are academics. Fewer than 4% of papers are co-authored by practitioners, down from 7.1% in the last analysis. While, we are improving diversity in many respects, we are not attracting (or publishing) papers by practitioners. If this reflects less research, or poorer research, being undertaken by or with practitioner co-authors then this is a concern for a discipline such as IS. The trend over time has been for more ISJ authors to be located in business and management schools or departments. Most recently, this percentage has increased again – from 43.3% to 46.3%. The percentage in IS departments has dropped again to 31.6%, while that from computer science has increased from a very low base to just over 5% and the number from ‘other’ has nearly doubled to 13%. However, caution needs to be exercised over the home academic units as the data is taken from the addresses of authors. Some authors may be in a department, within a school that is part of a faculty that is itself an element of a college which is a unit of an institution. Thus, someone may be in an IS department that is within a business school. The address they choose to use may refer to either (or both) – but perhaps reflects their preference for the unit they would most like to be associated with. Likewise, there is a diversity of titles for units that make classification problematic – departments of Tourism Information, Health Administration, Social Informatics, and Business Education for example. So, what does the ‘typical’ authorship of an ISJ paper look like? There will be multiple authors, of both genders who are unlikely to work in the same institution or even in the same country and whose departmental home disciplines are different. What these co-authors are researching remains diverse too. While ISJ has been known as an interpretivist journal around a third of papers are positivist. About half the papers are qualitative. In terms of the 10 questions and challenges that Avison & Fitzgerald (2012) posed in their final editorial, the ISJ has, recently, published more papers from under-represented regions, it has improved the gender balance of authors, and it has remained generalist in its outlook. We have published more papers, more issues and more special issues. We can continue to do better in these aspects, and other challenges remain. We would like to be more risk taking, we have plans for additional sections to reflect different aspects of IS and of research, and the journal needs to reflect the need that the IS community has identified for the impact of its research to be better understood and better communicated. We will take up these issues throughout this year. When we assumed the role of editors-in-chief in July 2012, we introduced a new era for the Information Systems Journal as management of the journal shifted to us from the founding editors. In our inaugural editorial we indicated our desire to retain the commitment to publishing high-quality research that is consistent with the founding mission of the journal. That is, the motivation for founding ISJ was a desire to publish work that pushed out the boundaries of acceptable methodology for conducting information systems research. Since the methodological norm in 1991 was quantitative and positivist research, ISJ was established to be a publication outlet for qualitative interpretive and later critical research. Going forward into the next 25 years we are committed to the founding principles of ISJ, as we interpret them today. First, we will continue to publish high quality research that is informed by the interpretive tradition. This means that while positivist and quantitative research is welcome, and indeed, has been published in significant quantity, the production of numbers and the testing of hypotheses are not sufficient. The paper must also ‘tell a good story’ with the literature review, the analysis of data, and the discussion. Second, we will continue to publish work that pushes out the boundaries of acceptable information systems research. But in 2015 this is less about methodology than it is about content. Therefore, while we continue to welcome and publish research about information system development and management, we also welcome and want to publish research on emerging topics of relevance to the information systems field. This would include, for example: papers about societal/environmental influences on information systems; research about information systems professionals; and the consequences of information systems – intended and unintended, positive and negative. We also encourage research on the effect of new technologies – such as 3D printing, ubiquitous computing, wearable computing, and the Internet of things – on information systems development and practice. Finally, we welcome research that will explore a future in which information systems are an ever more important component. For instance, information systems are increasingly embedded in organisations, in societies and even in people. However, these embedded systems and their implications for privacy, convenience or control are rarely subjected to in-depth investigations. Throughout 2015, as part of the ISJ 25th anniversary, we will publish, in addition to our regular papers and special issues, a set of invited papers. We invited all those who published in our very first volume, and some others, to consider submitting a paper for volume 25. Many accepted our invitation. It is remarkable how many of the people who published in ISJ 1(1-4) are still active in the field. This may reflect the youth of the discipline, the youth of those working in it 25 years ago, that ISJ attracted submissions from very young academics, or that continual reductions in pension entitlements globally have meant many people have continued working for longer than they had anticipated. The first paper in this issue is by Lee, Thomas and Baskerville who argue for the restoration of the IS artifact in design science. They do so by unpacking the concept of the IT artifact. In doing so they remind us that what is being designed is not the IT artifact, but the IS artifact, which consists of three artifacts: the technology artifact (the hardware and software), the information artifact (the message) and the social artifact (human actions). They illustrate the primacy of the IS artifact in design science with material from three cases. The result is to restore the idea that the study of design in information systems needs to consider the design of the entire IS artifact, not just the technology artifact. This result encourages an expansion in the use of design science research methodology to study a broader set of artifacts. Three cases serve as a reminder that the component parts of the IS artifact - the information artifact, the technology artifact, and the social artifact - all interact and combine into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the second paper, Myers and Baskerville contribute new methodological insights in their argument for active engagement by IS researchers during the conduct of ethnographic work. While most ethnographic research in information systems has been based on the traditional anthropological model in which the ethnographer observes but does not actively seek to change the situation, they argue for the incorporation of action research perspectives into ethnographic research. They do so by describing two existing types of research that relate ethnography and design. The first type is ethnography for design, in which the results of the ethnographic study of some context informs the subsequent design process. The second type is ethnography to study design. Here, the ethnographer is studying those who are engaged in the design activity. They contrast these with the third type, design ethnography, in which the ethnographer is actively engaged in the activity of design, production or introduction of artifacts. Hence, the researcher is intervening in changing the context being researched. The researcher is actively engaged with others in a future-oriented way: designing, creating, innovating, and improvising artifacts that may affect the cultural and social values under study. Hence, rather than being a passive observer of changes in human behavior or organizations and human society more generally, the design ethnographer becomes an active participant in shaping these changes. In the third paper of this issue, Alter passionately engages with the concept of the “IT artifact” and trenchantly argues that it is no longer useful, it has outlived its usefulness. IT artifacts are ubiquitous in research, yet there is a huge amount of inconsistency in the way the term is used, with the result that it no longer means anything in particular at all. Alter traces the way the definition of IT artifact has morphed since it was first used by Orlikowski & Iacono (2001) to definitions in 2013 that are so loose and all-encompassing as to be essentially meaningless. Alter also suggests that cousins of the IT artifact, notably the IS artifact, the sociotechnical artifact, the social artifact and the technical artifact, simply confuse the issue further, each overlaps to some extent with other artifacts. In order to fill the yawning void that will be created when the IT artifact is retired, Alter proposes three ways forward, the most ambitious of which develops Alter's own notion of IT-enabled work systems (Alter, 2013). As Alter notes in his conclusion, retiring the IT artifact will help to enhance the rigour of our research because we will not use terminology that is meaningless. Indeed, we will also focus on more useful research that is meaningful.

Organizations specify the processes that need to be followed in order to standardize employees’ work and improve their process execution. One important challenge in this context is the users’ lack of process knowledge. Employees’ process knowledge is a necessary prerequisite for proper process execution and a critical factor for achieving successful process standardization, improvement, and ultimately process performance. Therefore, it is key for organizations to support their employees with the proper process knowledge. In order to address this challenge, we propose the concept of process guidance and design process guidance systems to increase users’ process knowledge and their process execution performance. We argue that users require (1) general information on the process, such as an overview of all the steps and their sequence, (2) specific information on how to execute the steps to navigate through the process, and (3) the possibility to identify their current position within the process. When reflecting our DSR project, we identified three major key learnings. First, it was important to have identified multiple literature streams for the grounding of our design. Second, involving in a real-world case and engaging with our case company helped us to improve the relevance as well as the contribution of our research. Third, another important lesson learned is that researchers applying the DSR approach should be engaged with the DSR community, in particular the International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST) conference.

Sutirtha Chatterjee) join the editor-in-chief (Robert Davison) to craft a position statement regarding the ISJ's view on theory. It is applicable, with sensitivity, to the empirical research articles that we consider for publication.

This report is part of a series of publications on the status and development of the North-American Information Systems (IS) field and Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI), its counterpart in German speaking countries. Information systems in businesses and organizations are the main subject of research in IS and WI. Hence, both disciplines are applied fields of research. Thus, the valuation of research results and graduates by business practice are vital indicators for the disciplines’ status and success. Between 1991 and 2001 a plethora of articles were published in leading Information Systems (IS) journals and conference proceedings addressing the issue of relevance of IS research and teaching. This research report provides a comprehensive content analysis of this „relevance debate“ in the North-American Information Systems field. The perceptions, opinions, and recommendations of the contributors are presented structured according to statements of valuation, perception, explanation, and recommendation. The reconstruction of the main IS relevance debate indicates that all debate participants agree that relevance to practice plays a vital role for the IS discipline, but that the field largely lacks relevance in terms of research as well as in terms of teaching. The lack of relevance is, for example, illustrated by the general perception that research results rarely impact practice and that IT/IS professionals usually do not read academic IS journals. In order to analyse if the debate has lead to any changes in terms of practice relevance of the IS field the most recent literature and studies available on IS relevance are evaluated. Analysis results indicate that no significant changes took place. But various IS researchers still report on problems in terms of acceptance and perception of IS degree programs and research. Based on the perspectives of experienced researchers from WI and other European IS communities the concluding remarks of this report attempt to explain the apparent lack of change in the North-American IS field and provide suggestions for improving the current status of the IS field in terms of relevance.

A literature analysis of the use of Absorptive Capacity construct in IS research

The rapid evolution of health information systems (Health IS) research has led to many significantcontributions. However, while the Health IS subset of information systems (IS) scholarship hasconsiderably grown over the past two decades, this growth hasled to questions regarding the currentintellectual structure of this area of inquiry. In an effort to more fully understand how Health ISresearchhas contributed to the IS discipline, and what this may mean for future Health IS researchin the IS domain, we conduct an in-depth evaluation of Health IS research published in mainstreamIS journals. We apply citation analysis, latent semantic analysis (LSA), and social network analysis(SNA) to ourdata setof Health IS articles in order to: (1) identify Health IS research themes andthematic shifts, (2)determine which Health IS research themes are cohesive (versus disparate), (3)identify which Health IS research themes are central (versus peripheral), (4) clarify networks ofresearchers (i.e., thought leaders) contributing to these research themes, and(5) provide insights intothe connection of Health ISresearchto its reference disciplines. Overall, we contribute a systematicdescription and explanation of the intellectual structure ofHealth ISresearchand highlight how theexisting intellectual structure of Health ISresearchprovides opportunities for future research.

The use of Information Systems (IS) and Information Technology (IT) is penetrating a wider part of human life, broadening the scope of IS research accordingly. Nonetheless, extant IS research literature shows that it is the social and organizational contexts of IS design, implementation, and use which lead to the greatest problems. Thus, there is a need for a detailed knowledge about the context of IS, and the process whereby the IS influences, and is influenced by, the context. This chapter demonstrates the application of Developmental Work Research (DWR), which is an interventionist approach based on Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) for the study of work, organizations, and technology undergoing developmental transformation. The core of the approach consists of learning, development, and research as basic elements for both practitioners and researchers. It provides a dynamic framework for understanding and analyzing many areas of IS research and practice. The link between DWR and other research approaches used in IS research is also presented.

The exponential growth of digital content has generated massive textual datasets, necessitating the use of advanced analytical approaches. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as tools that are capable of processing and extracting insights from massive unstructured textual datasets. However, how to leverage LLMs for text analytics Information Systems (IS) research is currently unclear. To assist the IS community in understanding how to operationalize LLMs, we propose a Text Analytics for Information Systems Research (TAISR) framework. Our proposed framework provides detailed recommendations grounded in IS and LLM literature on how to conduct meaningful text analytics IS research for design science, behavioral, and econometric streams. We conducted three business intelligence case studies using our TAISR framework to demonstrate its application in several IS research contexts. We also outline the potential challenges and limitations of adopting LLMs for IS. By offering a systematic approach and evidence of its utility, our TAISR framework contributes to future IS research streams looking to incorporate powerful LLMs for text analytics.

agile information systems, flexible information systems development, distributed information systems development, global software development, software development, special issue

Design science research (DSR) aims to deliver innovative solutions for real-world problems. DSR produces Information Systems (IS) artifacts and design knowledge describing means-end relationships between problem and solution spaces. A key success factor of any DSR research endeavor is an appropriate understanding and description of the underlying problem space. However, existing DSR literature lacks a solid conceptualization of the problem space in DSR. This paper addresses this gap and suggests a conceptualization of the problem space in DSR that builds on the four key concepts of stakeholders, needs, goals, and requirements. We showcase the application of our conceptualization in two published DSR projects. Our work contributes methodologically to the field of DSR as it helps DSR scholars to explore and describe the problem space in terms of a set of key concepts and their relationships.