The status of information systems research in Australia: preliminary results

As the first stage of a study to investigate the status of Information Systems research in Australia, a survey of the heads of all IS discipline groups in Australian universities was conducted. The study revealed a wide range of topics researched (with rapid growth in Electronic Commerce and Knowledge Management), a range of foci, a balance between positivist and interpretivist research, survey was the most frequently used research method, and most research was directed at informing IS professionals. A SWOT analysis provided some further interesting results INTRODUCTION The first academic programs in Information Systems (IS) appeared in Australia in the late 1960s and have steadily grown to be available in almost all Australian universities. While the teaching of IS has grown, the growth of IS research has been slower and few studies have examined its progress. Ridley et al. (1998) studied publication performance over a seven-year period, but there has been no formal examination of the research profile of IS in Australian universities. This paper reviews the Australian IS research field along lines similar to part of the study conducted by Avgerou et al. (1999) in Europe, except that it focuses only on research. The study targeted the views of the heads of discipline from 36 Australian IS groups and was conducted on behalf of the Australian Council of Professors and Heads of Information Systems (ACPHIS 2001), and is part of a larger program to capture similar information from all Australian IS researchers.