An Empirical Investigation of Relevance in Information Systems Research

Relevance in Information Systems (IS) research is a current and has been a historical concern for the IS research community. While there have been articles published concerning theoretical aspects of relevance of IS research and despite calls for empirical research into the relevance of IS research, little empirical work has been forthcoming. The ethical perspective of the proposed article is that research in information technology must be relevant to be of value. The proposed article is currently in the development stage. This research takes the ontological position that "relevance" is a concept that exists only in the mind of the observer and is best validated by examining the perceptions of the observer. While is can be difficult to measure relevance we can measure dissemination of the IT research as a proxy for relevance. There have been calls for research of this specific nature. Further, this article proposal sees relevance in IS research as best judged by IS practitioners. The focus of the research is user acceptance of technology and end user systems satisfaction which are major areas of research in IS. These areas of research were chosen because they form a significant portion of all research in IS and are streams of research that would likely be of high importance and have practical application to IS management. It can be deduced that these are areas of academic IS research that are most likely to reach practitioners. There is a second advantage to using user acceptance of technology and end user systems satisfaction as the basis of this research; these are areas of research that likely will lead practice rather than lag practice and consequently are better positioned to be measured as having diffused from research to practice. The proposal is to review articles in the user acceptance of technology and end user systems satisfaction streams of research which appeared the following publications between the years 2000 and 2009 (inclusive): MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Decision Sciences, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Management Science. From the practical and management implications from each selected article, a summary is to be made of the significant relevant implication of the article as presented by the authors. The relevant implication is to be converted into a survey question using a semantic scale ranging from "Never heard of concept" (1) to "Very familiar with concept" (7). The proposed research is to use a web-based questionnaire solicited using emails to IS professionals based on available lists. The ultimate objective of this research proposal would be to develop an index that could be used to evaluate the relevance of published IS research.