Design Science Research: Looking to the Future

The previous chapters have taken you through the fundamentals of design science research, the problems, solutions space, design process, frameworks, outputs and artifacts, theories and dissemination of the research results. The design science research paradigm is highly relevant to information systems (IS) research because it directly addresses two of the key issues of the discipline: the central, albeit controversial, role of the IT artifact in IS research (Weber 1987; Orlikowski and Iacono 2001; Benbasat and Zmud 2003) and the lack of professional relevance of IS research (Benbasat and Zmud 1999; Hirschheim and Klein 2003). Design science, as conceptualized by Simon (1996), supports a pragmatic research paradigm that calls for the creation of innovative artifacts to solve real-world problems. Thus, design science research combines a focus on the IT artifact with a high priority on relevance in the application domain.