Relevance in Information Systems Research

Information Systems as an academic discipline makes two contributions to society. The first, knowledge exploration, is the creation of new knowledge that is not -- and should not be relevant to today's practitioner. The goal of knowledge exploration is to change the future, not improve the present. The second, knowledge exploitation, is the dissemination of knowledge to serve current practice (and to train future practitioners, our students). While I believe we have done a good job of knowledge exploration, I believe we need develop new vehicles to promote, nurture, and validate knowledge exploitation much like our academic cousins in Medicine, Engineering, and Computer Science. The debate over the relevance of academic research in the Information Systems community and the business school as a whole has a long history (AACSB, 1997). For much of the 20 th century, most business schools focused on very practical and relevant applied research. The Carnegie report (Pierson, 1959) was highly critical of this focus, and provoked a sharp turn to more "scientific" research like that of our cousins in the Arts and Sciences. Almost 30 years later, the Porter-McKibbin report (1988) was highly critical of the focus on theoretical research, and argued for greater focus on research relevant to practitioners. Over the last dozen years, we have seen many rapid changes and upheavals as new technologies have swept over organizations, and the research relevance debate resurfaced. Some believe that we as IS researchers watched from the sidelines rather than led these changes, and that our research is increasingly seen as irrelevant to the IS practitioners leading and responding to these changes. I believe there is truth in this charge: much IS research is irrelevant to practice. So shouldn't we as a discipline rush to embrace greater relevance? Well, no and yes.