The text accompanying the following slides was intentionally

written to be delivered in an informal and colloquial way.

In this keynote address, I’d like to talk about three wishes that I have for the information systems field. My reason for this is that I think it’s important to talk about the values that make us scholars. At conferences, we generally talk about the research that makes us scholars. It’s no less important for us to talk about the values that make us scholars. The research that we do is as much a function of our values as it is a function of our methodologies. Talking about what I wish for our IS field gives me a way to share with you some values that I think are important in being a scholar. But before I talk about the three wishes I have today, I’d like to talk about a different set of three wishes that I had when I started my career as an IS professor in 1986. That was the year I attended the AACSB Faculty Development Institute at the University of Minnesota, headed by Gary Dickson.

Way back then, one wish I had was for qualitative research to become accepted by the mainstream IS research community. I noticed, even back then, that the published research in the IS field as a whole was so esoteric that it didn’t make sense to practitioners or MBA students, and I thought that doing field work, such as a case study involving talking to actual people, could make research less esoteric and more useful. My intent was not for qualitative research to become the mainstream approach – it was just for the IS research mainstream to accept qualitative research. And it came true: the community of qualitative researchers throughout the world worked together and won the mainstream acceptance – something that I never thought would happen in my lifetime. And I saw the appearance of a new scholarly journal that publishes qualitative, field-based research relevant to practitioners: this journal is the MIS Quarterly Executive. A good number of people brought about the mainstream acceptance of qualitative research and the creation of MIS Quarterly Executive. Because of the hard work of scholars who held and acted on certain values, my wish about qualitative research winning mainstream acceptance came true.

Another wish I had way back 20 years ago was for IS research to explicitly embrace design research, in addition to traditional positivist and interpretive research. I managed to publish a book chapter, “Architecture as a Reference Discipline for MIS,” in 1991. I did nothing more on this until 1999, when I was editor-in-chief of MIS Quarterly and I paid a visit to the University of Minnesota to do one of their Friday research workshops. Jinsoo Park, then an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, was my host. He drove me around and invited me to dinner with his family, giving him and me plenty of time to talk. Jinsoo, a design-science researcher, told me about how poorly the IS mainstream treated design-science research, which was being largely excluded from certain major journals and conferences, and how the mainstream really did not understand or know how to judge design science research. As a qualitative researcher, I thought that this story was awfully familiar. I suggested to Jinsoo and to Sal March, who was still at the University of Minnesota at the time, to write a paper for the Quarterly with a title along the lines of “A Theory of the Science of Design for MIS." That was in 1999. Jinsoo and Sal ended up enlisting Al Hevner and Sudha Ram. Then, after tons of hard work and several revisions, in 2004 they published the MIS Quarterly paper, “Design Science Research in Information Systems,” which instantly became a classic. Jinsoo Park, Sal March, Al Hevner, and Sudha Ram did the hard work winning mainstream recognition for design science research (to the point where, today, Al is a senior editor at MISQ and Sudha is a senior editor at ISR). Because of the hard work of scholars who held and acted on certain values, my wish about design research winning mainstream acceptance came true.

A third wish I had was for there to be more diversity and equality in the IS field. One of my doctoral dissertation committee members, Dr. Phyllis A. Wallace, earned a PhD in economics from Yale in 1948 – an impressive achievement for anyone, but noteworthy also because few black women were earning PhD’s, much less from Yale, at that time. And in 1975, she became the first woman to be a full professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She mentored and materially helped me and other doctoral students of color. And a lesson I learned at that time was that inequality hurts everyone, not just those people who deserve to be, but aren’t, represented or included. When I became editor-in-chief of MIS Quarterly, I was in a position to do something about the fact that the Quarterly had never had an editor-in-chief who was a woman or a non-North American. Well, a major pool of candidates for the editor-in-chief position consists of current and past senior editors. So as editor-in-chief, I was in a position to appoint women and non-North Americans as senior editors. And because the major pool of candidates for senior editors consists of current and past associate editors, I increased the participation of women associate editors to 50% and the percentage of non-North American associate editors to about 30%. It was easy to find well qualified candidates. Then, with a growing pool of hard-working women and non-North American associate editors and senior editors, Ron Weber from Australia was appointed editor-in-chief after me, and Carol Saunders was appointed editor-in-chief after Ron. Because of the hard work of scholars who held and acted on certain values, my wish about more diversity and equality came true.

Today, at the age of 54, as I am planning how to complete all the items still left on my research agenda, I would like to make three more wishes for the IS field. One wish is intellectual, one wish is social, and one wish is political.

For the intellectual wish, I would like to see information systems research begin to pay serious attention to the concept of “systems.” The term “systems” has become so overused and misused that it has lost its meaning. As for the meaning that should be restored to it, I ask you to consider a picture where we have information technology and an organization.

In this picture, the information technology refers to hardware, software, and networks. The organization refers to the company’s division of labor, its reporting relationships, its culture, its social structure, its formal and informal reward-and-punishment system, and its business processes.

First, the organization poses information requirements for the information technology to satisfy. For example, a business interested in expanding into e-commerce can require new types of information to be delivered to it, to be processed, and to be sent from it.

Second, the information technology is then designed, implemented, installed, or otherwise procured so that it can deliver the information required by the organization.

Third, the information technology poses its own requirements for the organization to satisfy. I call these the organization requirements. For example, information technology that supports e-commerce could require the company to rearrange its warehouse in a new way or even to set up a separate warehouse to respond to e-commerce transactions. Similarly, ERP software can require a company to reengineer its manufacturing processes so that they will fit the processes that the ERP software was programmed to manage.

Fourth, in order for the organization to satisfy the information technology’s organization requirements, the organization itself is changed.

Fifth, because the organization is now different, it poses new and different information requirements for the information technology to satisfy.

Sixth, in order for the information technology to satisfy the organization’s information systems requirements, the information technology is changed once more.

Seventh, because the information technology is now different, it poses new and different organizational requirements for the organization to satisfy.

Well, you get the picture. This process continues without end. What I consider the information system to be is not just the information technology, and not even the information technology combined with the organization.

I consider an information system to be a non-stationary and non-stable entity that is continuously and endlessly emerging from the ongoing, mutually transforming interactions between the information technology and the organization.

But there is something missing in this picture of an information system. With a few changes in its words, this picture could describe just about any socio-technical system. Surely, there’s got to be something different when a socio-technical system is instantiated as an information system as opposed to some other kind of system.

And there is such a difference: I see it as the data system, where, by “data,” I am referring to numbers, text, and images that are stored electronically or on paper, and that are produced and reproduced manually or electronically.

Just as an organization poses requirements to the technology, the organization can pose requirements to the data. For instance, for the red arrow, given the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the data requirements refer to, among other things, new categories of data that the organization, in order to be in compliance, requires to be collected, stored, processed, and reported.

For the bright blue arrow, the organization requirements refer to those changes caused in organizational practices as a direct result of the new categories of data being collected, stored, processed, and reported, where the changed practices are required for the organization to be in compliance.

For the green arrow, the vast stores of all the new categories of data that are collected can require that certain types of information technology be provided to update and process the data, where the required technology can take the form of new hardware (additional computers), new software (a different DBMS), and extended networks. And so forth.

The data, the organization, and the technology all interact and change each other.

And they interact and change each other again, and again. This process continues without end. An information system is not just the information technology. And an information system is not just the information technology, the organization, and the data all simply co-existing, side-by-side.

Instead, an information system is a non-stationary and non-stable entity that is continuously and endlessly emerging from the ongoing, mutually transforming interactions between the data, the information technology, and the organization.

For the IS field to pay serious attention to this non-stationary and non-stable entity will not be easy. But as long as “systems” is in the name of our field, “information systems,” we are obliged to deal with what our name says – or advertises – we are about.

The second wish I have for the IS field today is a social wish: it’s to put back the researcher in information systems research. For as long as I’ve been in the IS field, research has been considered to be objective when it can stand independently of knowing subjects and all their supposed biasing influences. Why, for instance, is there such a great emphasis on research methods and validity criteria? The reason is rooted in our common, unexamined belief that, for research to be objective, different researchers, applying the same research methods to the same sets of data, will all get the same results – where, in other words, the human being who is the researcher makes no difference.

And if the researcher did make a difference – well, the results would then be considered biased and suspect. How ironic – the difference that a human being can make is sanitized out of the research process. A good researcher, it seems, is one who is removed from the research process. I blame this common, unexamined assumption for the oppressive effect that research methods have today. Reviewers of papers that we submit to journals use research methods, including validity criteria, to hammer out all the creativity from our research. Reviewers have been quick to castigate interpretive authors for not following, to the letter, the Klein and Myers validity criteria for interpretive field work. Reviewers are now doing the same with the Hevner, March, Ram, and Park validity criteria for design-science research. And of course, the reviewers are getting what the reviewers have been asking for, which is the emergence of a body of research where the creativity of different researchers is making less and less of a difference.

Interpretive researchers have said that the researcher himself or herself, as a human being, is the instrument of research – which means that, in order to have a good research instrument, you have to completely accept yourself and develop yourself as a human being. I believe that this is true for all researchers, not just interpretive researchers, but even interpretive researchers are beginning to forget this. My wish is for the researcher and the researcher’s full humanity to be put back into information systems research. I hope that, with the help of the younger generation of IS researchers, this wish will come true.

The third and last wish I have is political: I wish that IS scholars would accept and apply “non-rational rationales” to protect and cultivate our IS field.

Our field goes through periodic highs and lows in our enrollments, and our political fortunes rise and fall accordingly. The rise and fall in enrollments do not single-handedly cause the highs and lows in our political fortunes, but they can magnify the highs and lows. The questionable relevance of IS research, for instance, seems to be questioned even more whenever low enrollments make us take a second look at ourselves. For the low that our field is going through right now, how has our field responded? Well, the response has been to improve the research we are doing, by making it more relevant, and to improve our curricula, by making our course offerings more attractive. These are both rational responses, and there’s nothing wrong with rationality, but rationality alone is not enough. In addition to the rational, we also have to account for the political.

I have heard that our umbrella organization, AIS, has initiated an effort to accredit MBA programs, but unfortunately, that effort is now stalled. I hope that this effort gets back on track. Certifying MBA programs as technology literate, or not, would be politically shrewd. Imagine what it would be like for a business school whose MBA program is NOT certified as technology literate. And imagine that a condition for an MBA program to be considered technology literate is that it must have a required IS course in the MBA curriculum, where this course is taught by a professor who is actually doing IS research. As business schools across the nation clamor for AIS to officially certify them as technology literate, we’ll see that the number of jobs for IS professors will grow, we’ll see students taking additional IS courses when previously they never even took a single IS course, and even better, we’ll see graduates of MBA programs who will be technology-literate and won’t do stupid things anymore like spending millions of dollars on an ERP system without even first doing a requirements analysis.

Politics is not irrational. It is non-rational. And protecting and cultivating the IS field is a perfectly good “non-rational rationale” for creating, and exercising the use of, power.

Way back, in the 1980s, I had three wishes that I never thought would come true in my lifetime. Today, I have three more wishes, and I wonder if they will come true before I retire. Well, the only way for us to find out is to try. And having attended the SAIS doctoral consortium yesterday, I have good reason to look to our doctoral students – the next generation of IS researchers – to achieve what my generation can only wish for.

In fact, in 20 years, when I am attending an information systems research conference, I hope that I can walk up to the people who were the SAIS doctoral consortium participants in Richmond, way back in 2008 – Rakesh Babu, Robert Crossler, Long Li, Sumana Sharma, Manoj Thomas, and Paul (Xihui) Zhang – and I’ll be thanking you for your efforts in having made these three wishes come true.