First, there is the continuing problem of rigor vs. relevance.  This is the problem where our research is good, and perhaps even excellent, from the perspective of scientific rigor, but the same research has been, for the most part

· unreadable by managers,
· unteachable to our undergraduate and MBA students, and
· generally, irrelevant to practice.

(On this score, IS research is not alone; other areas of business-school research, including management science, organizational behavior, accounting, marketing, and finance, share this problem.)  In the March 1999 issue of MIS Quarterly, the rigor vs. relevance problem in IS research received attention in a series of articles from top scholars in our field, such as Izak Benbasat, Bob Zmud, Lynda Applegate, John King, Kalle Lyytinen, Tom Davenport, and Lynne Markus.  The problem of rigor vs. relevance is a dilemma in the following way.

One horn of the dilemma is this: When our IS field has done research that the rest of the business school and university would consider rigorous and scientific, then much of the resulting research has not been useable by real-life managers in real-life companies.  For some good examples of this, I turn your attention to the best IS research, published in journals such as MIS Quarterly and ISR.  The scientific rigor of much IS research today is impressive.  IS researchers who do hypothesis testing follow all the rules of experimental and quasi-experimental design, as prescribed long ago by Campbell and Stanley and then by Cook and Campbell.  These IS researchers use sophisticated statistical techniques, such as factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and partial least squares.  Of course, when it comes to the practicality or usefulness of this very rigorous research, the question is: what real-life managers in real-life companies ever do hypothesis testing, care about experimental controls, or need to use sophisticated statistical techniques?  And it’s not only quantitative and positivist research that suffers from this problem.  Recently, with the growing acceptance of qualitative research, I now observe that qualitative IS articles are now just as methodologically sophisticated – and esoteric – as their quantitative counterparts, with the same results regarding relevance: for instance, what real-life managers in real-life companies ever do hermeneutic interpretation, care about critical social theory, or commission a grounded theory?  So, whether our IS research is quantitative, qualitative, positivist, or interpretive, the result is that scientific rigor has pushed out professional relevance.

The other horn of the dilemma is this: Often, research that is useable by real-life managers in real-life companies is publishable because it does note appear to be rigorous and scientific.  When practitioners and consultants have submitted research for possible publication in a research journal, their submissions have generally been turned away for their lack of rigor. Well then, what about the possibility of professors trying to do relevant, applied research?  Well, when some professors try to do this, they are accused of doing "consulting" instead of "research."  The political danger of IS professors' doing such research is that other disciplines – those that do “basic” or “pure” research – would not consider us to be truly scientific.  In fact, up until the 1950’s, the applied and vocational orientation of business schools in the United States was the reason that they lacked academic respectability – and this, in turn, was the reason that business schools shifted from a vocational to a scientific orientation.  In this horn of the dilemma, the problem is that professionally relevant research would push out scientific research, which in turn would trigger the loss of scientific respectability.