Information Systems in and for Practice

The Information Systems (IS) discipline traces its origins to issues that were central to the interests of practitioners, but in recent years the practitioner perspective has often been neglected. Nevertheless, there is increasing recognition that the practitioner's perspective is still important and that the research we undertake can (or should) have implications for practitioners. In consequence, new IS journals that target a practitioner audience have been created, while some of the existing journals have demonstrated that they are open to practitioner-oriented submissions. In particular, the Information Systems Journal (ISJ) has for several years championed the publication of Practitioner Papers (PP). PPs can contribute to knowledge in a number of different ways, but our key objective in promoting PPs is to further the dialogue between academia and practice. Beyond this, PPs at the ISJ should (1) provide insights into the practitioner's perspective of IS in a particular context and (2) lay out specific, prescriptive, and actionable recommendations for practice. Recommendations for practice may include delivering insights that address a specific problem, offering a thorough exploration of a phenomenon and identifying specific practitioner problems. Prior to 2022, we found that submissions in the PP genre were sporadic and of varying quality. In order to encourage the undertaking of practitioner-oriented research, we initiated a special issue focused exclusively on practice. We envisaged that the range of topics that contributing authors might address would be wide. We decided that any topic area in IS that is of relevance to practitioners (and not only practitioner managers) should be in the scope of PP submissions. In line with a previous ISJ editorial (Davison et al. 2023), we are interested in learning what works and what kind of impact can be achieved at both the local and the global scale. We required at least one of the authors to be a current practitioner. This can include practitioners who hold adjunct positions in universities, but we expect that their full-time role is as a practitioner. Some papers were desk rejected because of a failure to meet this requirement. We also expected that the practitioner authors should be involved in some aspect of the writing of the paper, i.e., they should not simply provide access to data from their organisation, nor should they be nominal authors who made no contribution at all, yet were listed so as to satisfy the submission requirements. We also made sure to prevent academic authors from submitting manuscripts previously rejected at other journals because of a lack of theory. In order to assess the extent to which the practitioner authors were really involved, we asked the submitting author to submit an additional form in which they indicated the role played by each author. The completion and submission of this form has now become mandatory for all PP submissions at the ISJ: see Appendix A. We intended that PPs provide insights for both practitioners and academics and for those insights to be rooted in well-executed practice-based research. We made it very clear that the primary purpose of a PP is not to advance theory! Indeed, there may be no theory visible in the paper at all, though some degree of familiarity with theory may be valuable. This does not mean that theory is barred from PPs, but we do not want authors to imagine that their paper will be rejected if it fails to make a theoretical contribution. Instead, the purpose of a PP is to contribute actionable insights that will help practitioners solve practical problems and address challenges they face. These practitioners need not be limited to managers and executives such as the Chief Information, Technology or Digital Officer (CIO, CTO or CDO), but could involve any practitioner who engages with IS, e.g., frontline or back office employees, consultants, activists in NGOs, etc. Nevertheless, a PP may emerge from insights gained from a theoretically driven research project (see Pan and Pee 2020) in which case it would need to be written up as a separate document where the interests and perspectives of practitioners are the focus of the paper. We asked authors to consider carefully which practitioner audience could benefit from their findings and then to present their research in a style and using language that resonates with and is consumable by that audience. Consistently with all regular ISJ research submissions, we required the submitters of PPs to problematise their situation carefully (Chatterjee and Davison 2021), i.e., to provide a motivation for the study that is not a gap in the literature (even the practitioner literature, see below), but instead identifies a problem that affects specific practitioner stakeholders and is worth investigating. We did not expect PPs to be grounded in the academic literature, nor even to include a ‘literature review’ section because this would naturally lead to a discussion based on such premises, i.e., with a focus on advancing theory or addressing a research limitation. We instead strongly recommended that the problem and background provided in the front end of the paper concern practice and practitioners. In contrast to research articles, in a PP it is important to reference the practitioner-oriented literature when exploring the significance of the problem. Examples of this practitioner-oriented literature can be found in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, The Economist, CIO Magazine, McKinsey Quarterly, etc. In addition to the practitioner-oriented literature, PPs should (when applicable) include market and industry data to substantiate the authors' claims. First-hand insights from practitioner author(s), substantiated by the other sources mentioned above, will be particularly compelling. We believe that practitioner insights into what works, where, when, how, and why are particularly valuable and have the potential to demonstrate a high degree of impact. We require a high standard of evidence to convince reviewers of both the veracity of the findings and their contemporaneity; i.e., we did not want to see papers that reported on well-established norms, nor papers that simply related the unsubstantiated opinions of the authors. Although the impact could relate to organisations and their employees, it could also relate to a local community like a village, a non-profit, or the environment. We imagined that it would be valuable if the findings could be discussed in terms of their transferability (or not) to other contexts; i.e., we encouraged authors to acknowledge and discuss the boundary conditions of their study (Davison and Martinsons 2016). Finally, we imagined that it would be helpful if the authors could highlight the problem formulation process, particularly with respect to how the problem and its solution (if any) are significant in practice. We asked that methodology, if applicable, be succinctly presented, placing emphasis on the collaboration between researchers and practitioners, and particularly highlighting how practitioner input has informed and shaped the research. For PPs that required a more sophisticated method section, we recommended that most details be presented in an Appendix A, to avoid breaking the flow of the paper (since practitioners are more accustomed to reading short and sharp papers). Prescriptive frameworks, guidelines and best practices that practitioners can follow would be effective ways to capture the take-away for the practitioner audience. In order to ensure that the papers accepted for the special issue truly delivered on these expectations, we also instituted a new requirement for reviewing, namely that at least one reviewer should be a practitioner, with the same characteristics as the practitioner authors. This requirement is still in place for any new PP submission (see also the updated guidelines for authors for this paper genre1). To facilitate these practitioner reviewers' tasks, we created a special set of guidelines for the reviewers of PPs2 and requested that they adhere to the guidelines when undertaking the reviewing. We identified practitioner reviewers from several different sources: the submitting practitioner authors themselves, a LinkedIn call for volunteers, and our own contacts in the practitioner community. As it turned out, 74 extended abstracts were submitted by 31 December 2023, with commentary and advice offered to all authors within five business days. Seventy full papers were submitted by the deadline of 1 July 2024. Seventy is the largest number of manuscripts ever submitted to an ISJ special issue. The topics that these submissions addressed varied widely as expected, but the three most popular were, broadly, digital innovation, digital transformation, and generative artificial intelligence. Application contexts included: virtual tourism, healthcare, the automotive industry, the banking industry, cybersecurity, distributed governance, social justice, enterprise cloud software, lean manufacturing, university administration and a host of others. While many submissions targeted the managers of large enterprises, many also examined the opposite end of the spectrum, i.e., non-managers and SMEs, as well as the non-profit sector. The submitting authors are globally distributed, with substantial numbers from Europe (56%) in particular. While all 70 papers had at least two authors and 61 had three, several had four to seven authors and one paper had eight authors. In total, 279 authors are represented (some are associated with multiple papers) and are affiliated with institutions in 28 countries/territories (AT, AU, BE, CA, CH, CN, DE, ES, FI, FR, HK, IE, IL, IN, IT, LI, LU, NL, NO, NZ, PL, QA, SE, SG, UK, US, VN), with the most (50) from Germany. It is also worth noting that on a small number of papers, all the authors were practitioners. At the time of writing, 17 papers have been accepted for the special issue and a further 11 are still in process. The accepted papers include those with both solely practitioner and practitioner-academic author teams. In this editorial, we do not introduce each paper individually. Interested readers may access the complete set of PPs in a Virtual Issue.3 Working with authors, reviewers and associate editors (AEs) over the past 2 years led to challenges that we strived to address and from which we gleaned several key lessons that will help us improve the process of handling PP submissions in future. Our carefully crafted guidelines for reviewers were not always respected: some academic reviewers in particular, despite instructions to the contrary, insisted on focusing on theoretical contributions, recommending reject decisions for PPs that lacked theory or sophisticated methodological analyses. The same issue occurred, though less frequently, with AEs. Another important challenge we experienced with AEs was that, because of the specific characteristics of PPs, we tended to rely on the same 6–8 AEs who were involved at the outset of the special issue and had gained significant experience in managing this genre of submission. Consequently, we had to ask these AEs to manage several concurrent submissions (and we thank them for their time and timely reports since, specifically with PPs, we tried to always provide quick feedback and turnarounds). We have also realised that, despite guidelines and recommendations, the academic culture revolves around specific beliefs, such as theoretical contributions and literature-based problem statements, that are difficult to modify. This is likely to be one of the many reasons why few PPs are published in IS: the vast majority that are submitted are rejected. Apart from a focus on theory, academic reviewers often required authors to develop complex, academically styled methods sections typical of research papers, even though they hold little relevance for a practitioner audience and are thus not appropriate for PPs. As a result, we have updated the guidelines for reviewers to overemphasise this point. With respect to the practitioner reviewers, despite many volunteering, we experienced three challenges. The first is related to them being willing to agree to review by clicking a link in an invitation email, which is clearly not the same as offering to review. Many practitioners were too busy at the time of our request to review a paper. The second concerns the timely (or not) delivery of the review. For practitioners, being on time with a review rarely appeared to be a priority. Not only did we have to deal with more than a few practitioner reviewers who submitted their review late, but also those who simply never submitted at all. The third is about the quality and length of the review. We found that most practitioner reviewers were (too) positive. Their reviews seldom exceeded one page in length, with many being as short as a few sentences. This is also something to be expected, as practitioners in general have very little experience with the review process. To mitigate this issue, we involved practitioners who were also co-authors of PPs (who had thus seen others' reviews of their own manuscript) in the review process. As a complement to our database of academic reviewers competent to review PPs, we are also building a database of practitioner reviewers who are also authors, have become familiar with the review process, and are willing to keep reviewing (and submitting) PPs. Most submissions were dominated by academic authors, not just numerically but also intellectually. For instance, despite our stipulation in the author guidelines and call for papers that practice-based problems be the focus, initial submissions tended to focus on perceived gaps in the literature. Some papers devoted considerable space to discussing the literature or the industry background in a tedious textbook-style fashion, which left less room to convey the richness that their data and findings could provide with respect to local impact. A few also boldly touted the depth of their theoretical contributions. For instance, and with specific respect to the local impact, our expectation is that a study undertaken in South Africa would need to be situated in the South African context, to refer to the unique features of that context, and to inform recommendations that would be relevant in the South African context. However, such contextual insights were often buried under general discussions about a high-level domain or concept (e.g., ‘digital transformation’) and a habitual engagement with literature. Overall, even though our call for papers suggested that we were looking for very different kinds of submissions, this behaviour was predictable since we circulated the call for papers among academics and old habits clearly die hard. In the future we aim to identify specific practitioner networks to promote the opportunity for PP submissions at the ISJ. Despite these initial limitations of focus, when we envisioned potential submissions, we offered editorial revise-and-resubmit decisions, requesting authors to undertake major structural changes before we initiated the review process. These changes generally included: (1) problematising the issue at hand by focusing on a clearly defined, practically important phenomenon rather than a literature gap; (2) removing most academic references that are not directly relevant; (3) specifying the intended practitioner audience and clearly delimiting the scope of the study; (4) emphasising actionable recommendations that transcend generic good practice or common sense; (5) shortening methods sections in particular, but also the overall length of papers. We believe that the idea of offering prospective authors the opportunity to submit an extended abstract worked well. We were able to provide high-level feedback that, on the one hand, helped submitting authors improve their full manuscripts, while on the other hand, saved the time of authors whose proposals were out of scope by discouraging them from submitting a full manuscript. We offer the same service for regular PP submissions, though few authors take advantage of this arrangement. We also committed to very quick turnarounds. With extended abstracts, we provided feedback within 5 business days. With the full manuscripts, our aim was to stay within three review rounds for manuscripts that ended up being published. This target has largely been attained. Our goal was to try to publish PPs within a year of submission. We were able to accomplish this goal for a very small number of submissions, yet the exigencies of the review-revise process, notably delays by reviewers and authors, conspired to prevent this target from being met more generally. Instead, the majority of accepted papers received their final decision within 18 months of initial submission, and we expect that the vast majority will be accepted within 2 years. We are conscious that the desired ‘time to market’ of the PPs was poorly communicated to the authors (and in some instances to the reviewers and AEs). We are keen to make these expectations clear in the guidelines for authors and reviewers/AEs. In this editorial, we have provided an update on the special issue and reflected on the lessons learned. The special issue created opportunities to implement and evaluate new processes, including the involvement of practitioner authors and reviewers, and has prompted some rethinking about how research can be both conducted jointly by academics and practitioners, and presented to achieve practical impact and engage a new audience. While we believe that this special issue is successful, we base this assumption only on the number of submissions (and accepted papers) and on our knowledge of the practitioner world. We recognise the need to develop criteria and metrics to assess the real success of PPs published by the ISJ, with a particular focus on the broader impact. We operationalise ‘success’ with the following: (1) Are these papers disseminated to, downloaded, and read by practitioners? (2) Do they help practitioners navigate challenging situations associated with IS? (3) Do they inform scholars of what happens outside academic boundaries? In addition, we still need to work on the identification of quantitative and qualitative measures and metrics to assess the merit of PPs, given that typical points of reference such as citations might not reflect the real value of these papers. To improve our ability to assess the impact of PPs, we will need to co-opt the practitioner authors who have contributed to the special issue. This will in part be facilitated by the Virtual Issue where all the accepted papers for the special issue can be found. We will bring this virtual issue to the attention of all the submitting authors and reviewers (practitioner and academic), so that it is easier for potential readers to access the papers. About two thirds of the papers are open access which will also facilitate access by practitioners. We also make extensive use of LinkedIn (where the journal has its own page4) as a way of drawing attention to the virtual issue and the PP genre. A year after the last PP in this special issue has been published, we will aim to collect data from all authors regarding how they have promoted their own papers, in particular within practitioner communities. We will also trace citation counts and of these articles, with a particular focus on the literature. For instance, the first three PPs to be accepted in the first months since received and full which are of the value of their We would like to thank the many who in or positions for this special issue, as well as the of Apart from the special issue and as additional as for the special and The authors no of Appendix A The data that the findings of this study are from the author