Empirical Research in Information Systems: The Practice of Relevance

This commentary discusses why most IS acade- mic research today lacks relevance to practice and suggests tactics, procedures, and guidelines that the IS academic community might follow in their research efforts and articles to introduce rel- evance to practitioners. The commentary begins by defining what is meant by relevancy in the context of academic research. It then explains why there is a lack of attention to relevance with- in the IS scholarly literature. Next, actions that can be taken to make relevance a more central aspect of IS research and to communicate impli- cations of IS research more effectively to IS pro- fessionals are suggested.

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