Information Systems - The State of the Field
.pdf304 Further Reflections on the Identity Crisis
REFOCUSING IS RESEARCH ON ISSUES
OF DESIGN
In the section of our original paper discussing ‘errors of exclusion’ we posed the following question: ‘Why is it problematic to publish research excluding the IT artifact and/or elements from its immediate nomological net in IS journals?’ Our answer to this question was focused solely on the implications such a course of action would have on the distinctiveness and hence the legitimacy of IS with respect to related scholarly disciplines and as a consequence the investment business schools would be willing to make in IS as an intellectual field vis-à-vis other entrenched disciplines.
There is a second important consequence that we would now like to include in our answer. In an earlier commentary (Benbasat and Zmud, 1999) concerning the relevance of IS academic research, we made the following recommendation (p. 11):
In order for IS research to be more relevant, IS academics should portray the outputs of their research in ways such that it might be utilized by practitioners to justify and rationalize IT-related initiatives.
We believe that the absence of direct linkages to IT artifacts in IS research projects contributes to a lack in relevance for practitioners. In the IS research from earlier periods (i.e., 1970–85), many examples of work can be found where researchers focused on investigating the impact on decision making performance (i.e., decision quality, time taken and errors made) of a variety of design alternatives enabled through the application of IT artifacts, such as graphical representations, exception reports, direct manipulation interfaces, decision aids, etc. (e.g., Benbasat and Schroeder, 1977). The findings of these studies led to explicit system design recommendations that could be utilized by practitioners. More recently (i.e., 1990 and later) one of the dominant topics in IS research has been investigating the factors that influence the use and adoption of IS (e.g., Davis, 1989; Moore and Benbasat, 1991). This research has provided connections between the variables studied in earlier work, such as an effective decision aid can lead to higher decision quality (perceived usefulness) or a direct manipulation interface can lead to less time and fewer errors in both learning and using an IS (perceived ease of use), leading to higher intentions to adopt an IS.
Unfortunately, over time the focus of much IS research has gradually shifted away from the study of design (of an IS, of an IT/IS organization, of an IT/IS policy, of an IT-enabled process, of an
Concluding Comments 305
IS-enabling process, etc.) alternatives to variables that Orlikowsky and Iacono (1999) term ‘technology as perception’, namely, ease of use, compatibility, usefulness, confirmation, satisfaction, trust, enjoyment, flow, etc. It is of course worthwhile to understand the relative importance of such perceptions in influencing intentions or behaviors, across different contexts (e.g., the adoption of decision support aids, Internet-based purchasing, etc.). The observation that usefulness is more important than ease of use in influencing IS adoption, or that trust becomes more salient in certain contexts, does lead to valuable insights. However, the practitioner still needs to know what makes a design useful and easy to use (or follow, or implement, etc.). For example, why would a customer trust an online product recommendation agent? In designing an online product recommendation agent, what elements are most important for engendering trust? What is the nature of the standards, if any, that should be devised, disseminated and enforced across an enterprise regarding the design of recommendation agents? These are instances where the nature of the IT artifact comes into play and where IS scholars can make intellectual contributions that are unique to the discipline.
Hence, our suggestion to reduce the errors of exclusion is to refocus at least some of our attention and research investment on the front end of the ‘design → solution → perceptions → intentions → behavior’ continuum, identify and investigate the design alternatives that improve our application of technology, and as a consequence lead to more actionable advice for practice.
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
IS academics have periodically discussed the nature of their field for over three decades. As it is often asserted, maybe we are no different than other scholarly disciplines within business schools that have and are going through similar debates. Nevertheless, this does not diminish the importance of such soul-searching periodically. The IS community attempted to define what MIS is in the early 1970s, continued by discussing the reliance of IS on its reference disciplines at the first ICIS conference in 1980, argued that IS ‘cannot be disciplined’ (Banville and Landry, 1989) yet called for both a search for core theories and relevance in the 1990s, leading to current thinking. These discussions will no doubt continue in the future. They are important in that they allow the members of our community to better understand others’ views, most often
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revealing what unites, rather than divides, the community. We are pleased that our paper has been the catalyst for an extensive and healthy debate, one that in our opinion has been more extensive and focused than ever before, culminating in the publication of this book.
REFERENCES
Alter, S. (2003a) ‘18 reasons why IT-reliant work systems should replace ‘the IT artifact’ as the core subject matter of the IS field,’ Communications of the AIS, 12, October, pp. 366–95.
Alter, S. (2003b) ‘Sidestepping the IT artifact, scrapping the IS silo, and laying claim to ‘systems in organizations’, Communications of the AIS, 12, November, pp. 494–526.
Banville, C. and Landry, M. (1989) ‘Can the field of MIS be disciplined’, Communications of the ACM, January, pp. 48–61.
Benbasat, I. and Schroeder, R. (1977) ‘An experimental investigation of some MIS design variables’, Management Information Systems Quarterly, 1(1), March, pp. 37–49.
Benbasat, I. and Zmud, R. W. (1999) ‘Empirical research in information systems: The practice of relevance,’ Management Information Systems Quarterly, March, pp. 3–16.
Davis, F. D. (1989) ‘Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology,’ MIS Quarterly, September, 13(3), pp. 318–40.
Moore, G. C. and Benbasat, I. (1991) ‘Development of an instrument to measure the perceptions of adopting an information technology innovation’, Information Systems Research, 2(3), September, pp. 192–222.
Orlikowsky, W. and Iacono, S. (2001) ‘Research commentary: Desperately seeking the “IT” in IT research—A call to theorizing the IT artifact’, Information Systems Research, June, pp. 121–34.
Whinston, A. B. and Geng, X. (2004) ‘Operationalizing the essential role of the IT artifact in IS research: Gray area, pitfalls, and the importance of strategic ambiguity’, MIS Quarterly, 28(2), June, pp. 149–59.
15
Further Reflections on the IS Discipline: Climbing the Tower of Babel
Heinz K. Klein and Rudy A. Hirschheim
INTRODUCTION
The collection of papers presented in this book provides a fascinating view of the diversity in the field. In reading them, we have come to admire the detail with which many authors were able to communicate their points of view. However, we also feel that some of the contributions take too narrow a perspective. By reaffirming the broader perspective of our own ‘reflection’ we might not only point to the limitations of some of the arguments presented, but also— and maybe more importantly—identify interesting and at times surprising interconnections both of a mutually supporting or contradictory nature that would prompt us to be more explicit about certain topics in our JAIS article if we were to rewrite it with the benefit of what we have learnt from this discussion. It was not easy for us to wrap our mind around the many divergent points of view and fight our tendencies to distort them to fit our own theoretic prejudices. We literally felt we were going round and round, climbing the many staircases of the proverbial ‘Tower of Babel’ to make sense of this disjointed collection of ideas. Each contribution was convincing and internally consistent, but somewhat disjointed with the others. In the end, we organized our comments that directly relate to specific parts of the article collection around three questions:
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1.Where is the ‘information’ in the Information Technology artifact? This question relates to three papers in this book, i.e. Benbasat and Zmud; Orlikowski and Iacono; and Hevner et al. From their contributions, we recognize the need to be explicit about the relationship between differing conceptualizations of information, knowledge and ‘information’ technology and the long-term consequences of a technocratic view of the discipline.
2.What is the potential contribution of focusing on ontological representations as Weber’s contribution suggests? In addressing this question, the issues of the representational fallacy and currently missing core phenomena emerge.
3.Why is it important for the IS research community to develop and adopt realistic views about the social structure and processes of the IS research community? This question points to a set of issues that the contributions of DeSanctis, Galliers, Lyytinen/King and Robey have raised in our mind regarding the external legitimacy of IS as an academic discipline.
WHERE IS THE ‘INFORMATION’ IN THE TECHNO-CENTRIST IT ARTIFACT FOCUS?
Whilst we agree that the IT artifact must not be simply ignored, it seems clear to us that only an emaciated image of the IT artifact and its embedded nature could be captured in terms of quantitative variables. Orlikowski and Iacono cogently demonstrated this claim with their classification of different ways of conceptualizing IT (productivity tool, social relationships tool, etc.). The following issues come to mind when reflecting on the critical comments that the contributions by Benbasat and Zmud; Orlikowski and Iacono; and Hevner et al. provoked. Their positions also caused us to reflect on the relationship between the past priorities on how IT should be used for mostly well-defined instrumental purposes and the potential threat of the outsourcing phenomenon, which has many of our colleagues worried (cf. Gopal et al., 2002; Davis et al., 2004; King, 2004; Hirschheim et al., 2005).
On the Nature of Information
The principal problem with focusing primarily on the IT artifact is that it uses the ambiguous acronym ‘I’ for information, when in fact no artifact can produce information or its nobler cousin ‘knowledge’. Information is the point of some message that helps someone, a
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group or individual, to reduce complexity, accomplish a purpose, or recognize that they are somehow mistaken and were about to engage in foolish or even dangerous pursuits. Often such a point is conveyed with a speech act that ultimately helps someone to see pertinent facts in a new light. Speech acts are connected to human intentions to accomplish something, i.e. to get someone to accept an assertion as true or to move someone to action with a promise, etc. No artifact can do this unless the message receiver sees the technology message source as a trustworthy ‘stand-in’ (or substitute) of some human agent, friend or foe. The IT artifact is at best a vehicle for symbol storage and manipulation. Therefore we would argue that most of what is truly at the core of IS as a discipline happens after the artifact has done its part, namely when someone, a human agent with interpretive faculties, attributes the right meanings to the reams of symbols spewed out by the artifact. Hence focusing on the artifact too narrowly would cause us the miss the information phenomenon and therefore what, in our opinion, should be the very core concerns of our discipline.
If the above is accepted as common sense wisdom, then ‘IT’ is at best a misnomer and at worst a purposefully misleading advertising slogan to serve the vested interests of IT-dependent industries and professions (including some academics). The IT notion is a clever propaganda slogan because with the briefest of all acronyms it signals to management and most consumers that computers can do something very sophisticated, i.e. automate away the hard work that it takes to gain information and even knowledge. However, the sober fact is that any storage and data processing technologies from Gutenberg to the so-called ‘knowledge systems’ have done nothing but storing and manipulating codes. Whether the codes brought to human attention assume meaning, and are thereby converted into data, depends on the human minds interpreting them. Some data may then, indeed, after some more hard brainwork, turn out to be information and knowledge for some users, but not all. Because IT can at best convey but not produce information and knowledge (nor even store it for that matter), the term data technology (DT) or even more accurately, code processing technology (CPT), would be much more honest labels than IT.
Nomological Net or Social Nature of IS?
In recognition of this basic fact, it is now widely accepted that information systems scholars and many practitioners deal with the human and social side of DT as well, including its hermeneutic and phenomenological dimensions (cf. Boland’s 1978, 1979, 1985, 1987,
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1989 classical contributions; also Winograd and Flores, 1980, 1986). Therefore, we should squarely put the nature of information and knowledge at the core of our discipline along with investigating the conditions that must be met so that data technology can successfully convey information and knowledge to its users. Of paramount importance is to recognize from the very start of IS research that users do not live in a social vacuum as they participate in various types of social entities, such as groups, communities of practice, organizations and others. All of these contribute to the users’ ability to interpret codes as data and glean information and knowledge from the data. In other words: IS are socially embedded. Therefore, the inadequacy of the ‘IS equals IT’ perspective follows from Kling’s (1987) web-model concept of IS even more forcefully than from the more recent Orlikowski and Iacono (2001) analysis (interestingly enough, Iacono collaborated with Kling in developing the web-model view of IS):
. . . web-models view computer-based systems as complex social objects whose architecture and use are shaped by the social relations between influential participants, the infrastructure that supports them, and the history of commitments. (Kling, 1987, p. 314)
Because the IT-centered discussion tends to ignore this basic insight, we argue that the ways in which the IT artifact concept tends to be used reveals that it is yet another reincarnation of technological determinism. We believe that the web-model view or, more broadly, the social perspective of IS connotes more than just superficial relabeling. Therefore, it contrasts with Benbasat and Zmud’s nomological net model, which puts the IT artifact as an independent variable at the center.
However, this does not mean that we would advocate ignoring technology knowledge entirely. While our earlier JAIS article failed to mention the IT artifact or its social embeddedness specifically, knowledge about computing and communications technologies would make up an important part of what we had termed a Body of Knowledge for IS in general and ISD in particular (cf. Iivari, Hirschheim and Klein, 2004). First, our classification embraced technical knowledge as a separate category, which comprises the usual spectrum of hardware and software. However, important details also surface under the headings of theoretical and applicative knowledge. This would comprise the matters which Orlikowski and Iacono outline in their article’s conclusion as well as Kling’s web-model research.
Therefore, we conclude that the IT artifact focus or, as it should be called more accurately, the ‘code processing’ artifact focus, is too
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restrictive because it would ultimately lead to an engineering perspective of IS accepting technological determinism as its main concept of the deep structure for explanation. This would narrow the field of IS to the point that it can be absorbed into software engineering—which the SWEBOK debate on professionalization has already proposed. Moreover, conceiving of IT in terms of variables leaves out the much richer views of an interpretive conceptualization of IS phenomena (as has been demonstrated by many researchers and is also highlighted in Orlikowski and Iacono’s conclusions). The result, we believe, would be that the many insights interpretive researchers have contributed since the 1990s would at best be demoted to preliminary pilot studies or, even worse, relegated to the scrapheap of unreliable and irrelevant work.
Dangers of Techno-centrism and the
Appliance Mentality
A similar consequence follows from Hevner et al.’s view of the nature of design science. We see this as leading to relegating any research as irrelevant that cannot be pressed into the following format: Conceptualization of variables → Model formulation → Hypothesis derivation →Data collection and test →Repeat from step 1.
The ultimate ideal behind this concept of cooperation between positivist behavioral science and engineering prototypes is what Allen Lee (undated) has called the ‘appliance mentality’. Practitioners with this ideal tend to treat ‘their information system as if it was something you simply buy and then plug in, like a refrigerator or washing machine’ (cf. Figure 1 in http://www.people.vcu.edu/~aslee/ bitworld/sld003.htm). From this perspective, the role of IS research would simply be to create the appliance designs that can be manufactured by vendors and then sold to specific organizations or individuals. (Interestingly, this seems to be the model of ERP.) From an appliance perspective, the building and operation of IS would simply be relegated to the cheapest producer. This of course has recently happened with increasing outsourcing and offshoring. From an appliance perspective, ‘IS does not matter anymore’ because most of the designs have been standardized as happened to other industrial commodities. We call the link-up of behavioral IT-centered hypothesis testing with design science, the techno-centrist perspective of IS.
Another logical and dangerous consequence of IT artifact technocentrism is that it would deny IS researchers the legitimacy of engaging in fundamental criticism. This issue is also clearly raised in Robey’s (2003, p. 356) lucid critique of Benbasat and Zmud’s dominant research paradigm preference. From our perspective, critical research
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is necessary to reveal vested interests, one-sided distribution of cost and benefits, and other socially damaging practices. Some examples of the need for such critical impact research are the early creation of alienating typing pools (it was a naïve reincarnation of Taylorism), online addiction syndrome, the neglect of long-term consequences of process redesign (BPR), and offshoring. Another recent area necessitating critical impact studies is the so-called digital divide or the undermining of rational choices through subliminally manipulative social ideologies (as was practiced by the tobacco industry but continues today with the gambling industry over the Internet). Techno-centrism would simply marginalize all such research in IS, which to us is a step backward in our evolution.
A CRITIQUE OF THE
ONTOLOGY-REPRESENTATION PROPOSAL
FOR THE DISCIPLINARY CORE
Whilst we agree that considerations of ontology are very important for the field, Weber’s commentary on ontological representation provoked two issues in our mind. The first has to do with his proposal for the field to adopt a realist ontological position. In short, there are two fundamental types of ontological positions on ‘representation’: ontological realism and social constructivism. Weber’s position is a good example of the former. It creates the attitude that human intelligence in general and AI research in particular has evolved around ‘faithful representations’. Our concern with this position is that it leads to the revival of the so-called ‘representational fallacy’ to which early AI succumbed. The fallacy has been extensively debated in the so-called ‘linguistic turn’, which is often summarized with the key phrase that ‘language may be the only reality that we have’. We worry that IS researchers falling prey to this representational fallacy would lead the field down a path that is ostensibly a dead end. IS would simply repeat the AI approach to natural language processing of the 1960s and 1970s, which led to over-blown expectations of AI (e.g. Simon, 1977) and eventually to a road block for further progress. Since Winograd and Flores’ (1986) analysis of the representational fallacy is easily accessible, we will focus on a second issue that Weber’s commentary explicitly raises. After noting, ‘how we design good or faithful representations of other systems has remained the focus of Wand’s and my work’, he continues (p. viii):
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I fully accept that other types of information systems-related phenomena might exist for which theories borrowed from or adapted from other disciplines provide an inadequate account . . . For the moment, however, I am unable to identify such phenomena. Nonetheless, for two reasons I hope such phenomena exist. First, having a core that includes more than representational phenomena would likely make for a richer, more-interesting discipline . . .
In the following, we shall point to such phenomena which our JAIS paper unfortunately omitted. We feel the type of ontologies that Weber speaks of can have only temporary validity for building specific applications in a changing world of social constructions. The only exception would be ontologies for IS applications dealing with stable phenomena that are relatively well understood—such as tracking traffic patterns or inventories. However, from meteorology to particle physics, stable ontologies are rare or non-existent. Therefore, the approach to define and communicate a core identity for the IS community through ontologies is insufficient. Moreover, an overwhelming focus on ontologies is potentially dangerous because it is likely to introduce the same limitations that have already surfaced in past AI research with the representational fallacy (cf. Winograd and Flores, 1986).
Which Phenomena Could Potentially Serve as a Future Core for IS Research?
Our position is essentially that representation is only one of the important language functions along with the other of ‘getting something done’. Language is a type of human action in which meanings are not only represented, but through which we also engage with the world and change it by influencing others, create new objects (like founding an organization and/or establishing a new law) and create new states of affairs and constraints. Hence, representations alone, even if interpreted as social constructions rooted in the lifeworld of ‘communities of practice and knowing’ (cf. our comments below) do not suffice for capturing the principal IS core phenomena; what must be added? We believe that we made a suggestion for this in Hirschheim, Klein and Lyytinen (1996). This suggestion is connected to Wittgenstein’s ‘use theory of language’ and its later expansions into speech act theory (1922, 1958), which was then absorbed into a number of social action theories (e.g. explicitly into Habermas’ [1984, 1987] action types; and Giddens’ [1984] human agency).
To put it simply, we argued that the business of the IS discipline is to study how various technologies affect social action. Social action