The Relevancy of Information Systems Research: The Practitioner's View

Recently, the subject of research relevancy has received a great deal of attention in the IS academic press. Several leading academic journals, such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Information Resources Management Journal have devoted special issues and/or articles to this topic. Typically, these articles have been opinion pieces from leading IS academics i.e., Benbasat, Zmud, Robey, Lee, etc. and have not included significant input from practitioners within the IS area. This chapter tries to capture the IS practitioners' perspective on research relevance through a survey sent to 400 IS practitioners. The results indicate that IS practitioners 1 do not know where academic research is published; 2 find academic research dated; 3 find academic research difficult to read; and/or 4 find the recommendations included in academic research to be of little value.

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