A framework for understanding artificial intelligence research: insights from practice

I n 2008, the Research and Publications Committee of the Information Systems Section of the American Accounting Association decided to sponsor a special issue of the Journal of Information Systems (JIS) entitled ‘‘Reviews of Information Systems Research.’’ The objective of the special issue is to ‘‘publish papers that review a stream of research in information systems (IS) broadly defined.’’ The Committee intended that submissions would review and integrate the IS (information systems) and AIS (accounting information systems) literatures and suggest future research directions in both disciplines. The special issue followed a previous valiant and groundbreaking effort in IS/AIS research integration for the IS section by Professors Vicky Arnold and Steve Sutton (Arnold and Sutton 2002). As editor of this special issue, I took a somewhat different approach to the task than is normal. First, rather than a regular call for papers, I requested researchers to submit extended abstracts. The objectives of this approach were to ensure that the scope of the proposed article was concomitant with the objective of the special issue and to identify any potential overlaps in subject matter. In this process, I was able to negotiate the amalgamation of several writing teams. I also ensured that where there was commonality in subject matter, the writing teams were introduced to each other and worked to manage the writing process. Second, I had clear views on how the papers should be structured. As an author of one of the chapters in the earlier monograph for the IS section, I was impressed with the systematic approach Dr. Arnold took to ensuring a common approach in the structure of the contributions and the discipline exercised in ensuring that the goals of the monograph were achieved. It is simpler to achieve a common approach in a monograph than it is in separate papers in JIS. My ambition was, then, to strongly suggest directions to authors but not to mandate a single approach. As a consumer of many literature reviews, I realize how easy it is to maroon readers in a Sargasso Sea, not knowing how to navigate their way. Readers need clear navigational markers and a sense of direction. Third, I saw the review process as a mutual exercise among writing teams, reviewers, and myself as editor. Given the scope of this exercise, I deliberately took a more active editorial role than is normal. These objectives probably added somewhat to the time taken for publication but did, I believe, improve the quality of the papers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly transforming business operations and society, as AI capabilities are incorporated into applications ranging from mobile personal assistants to self-driving cars. The potentially disruptive nature of AI calls for an extensive investigation into all aspects of AI-human interactions at individual, group, organizational and market levels. However, there is paucity of academic information systems (IS) research in this area that goes beyond the development and testing of specific narrow AI capabilities. AI represents an important opportunity for organizational and behavioral IS researchers, but also presents challenges associated with the underlying complexity of AI technologies and the diversity of AI applications. Understanding how existing AI research and business practice relate to traditional areas of IS research is an important step towards creating a comprehensive behavioral and organizational AI research agenda. This dissertation seeks to achieve a dual purpose in a series of three essays. Essay 1 seeks to understand the current state of business AI research and practice in business through a quantitative literature review, relate the findings to traditional IS research areas, and identify potentially fruitful research areas for AI-focused IS research. Essays 2 and 3 seek to address specific research questions related to one of such research areas, namely, human interactions with AI enabled applications. Essay 2 focus on user experience with a chatbot, a popular AI application, and Essay 3 explores how user experiences with AI assistant apps differ from their interactions with more traditional IT artifacts.

The Information Systems Journal (ISJ) was launched in 1991 with a vision. In response to the growing use of interpretive methods based on qualitative data by information systems (IS) researchers -especially in Europe -and in response to the stance of the majority of IS journals that were oriented towards publishing positivist IS research employing quantitative dataespecially in the USA -this new journal was established by David Avison and Guy Fitzgerald who served as Editors-in-Chief for the next 21 years. The journal was physically situated in Europe, with the editorial office located at a variety of institutions in the UK. Over time the ISJ has grown in scope, methodologically and geographically: papers representing all epistemological and methodological traditions are published in the journal, with authors coming from all inhabited continents.

Editorial

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Sutirtha Chatterjee) join the editor-in-chief (Robert Davison) to craft a position statement regarding the ISJ's view on theory. It is applicable, with sensitivity, to the empirical research articles that we consider for publication.

Editorial

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Editorial: There Are Promises to Keep and Miles to Go Before I Leave…

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About Our Authors

About Our Authors

This report is part of a series of publications on the status and development of the North-American Information Systems (IS) field and Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI), its counterpart in German speaking countries. Information systems in businesses and organizations are the main subject of research in IS and WI. Hence, both disciplines are applied fields of research. Thus, the valuation of research results and graduates by business practice are vital indicators for the disciplines’ status and success. Between 1991 and 2001 a plethora of articles were published in leading Information Systems (IS) journals and conference proceedings addressing the issue of relevance of IS research and teaching. This research report provides a comprehensive content analysis of this „relevance debate“ in the North-American Information Systems field. The perceptions, opinions, and recommendations of the contributors are presented structured according to statements of valuation, perception, explanation, and recommendation. The reconstruction of the main IS relevance debate indicates that all debate participants agree that relevance to practice plays a vital role for the IS discipline, but that the field largely lacks relevance in terms of research as well as in terms of teaching. The lack of relevance is, for example, illustrated by the general perception that research results rarely impact practice and that IT/IS professionals usually do not read academic IS journals. In order to analyse if the debate has lead to any changes in terms of practice relevance of the IS field the most recent literature and studies available on IS relevance are evaluated. Analysis results indicate that no significant changes took place. But various IS researchers still report on problems in terms of acceptance and perception of IS degree programs and research. Based on the perspectives of experienced researchers from WI and other European IS communities the concluding remarks of this report attempt to explain the apparent lack of change in the North-American IS field and provide suggestions for improving the current status of the IS field in terms of relevance.

About Our Authors

Ram Bala (“ Competitive Behavior-Based Price Discrimination for Software Upgrades ”) is an assistant professor of operations management at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India. He holds a Ph.D. in management science from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. His main research areas are product line design, promotional effort allocation, global product development, and pricing and contracting strategies for services. His research cuts across disciplinary lines, particularly operations management, marketing, and information systems. Roger Calantone (“ How Peripheral Developers Contribute to Open-Source Software Development ”) is the Eli Broad Chaired University Professor of Business at Michigan State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. He has served on over 125 dissertation committees and has coauthored numerous articles in academic journals in the areas of innovation, systems and product development, and decision support systems for innovation processes and routines. Jamie Callan (“ The Halo Effect in Multicomponent Ratings and Its Implications for Recommender Systems: The Case of Yahoo! Movies ”) is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute and School of Information Systems and Management. His research and teaching focus on text-based information retrieval, primarily search engine architectures, federated search of groups of search engines, adaptive information filtering, text mining, and information retrieval for educational applications. Paul Chwelos (“ Information Technology and Intangible Output: The Impact of IT Investment on Innovation Productivity ”) was an assistant professor of Management Information Systems at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia. He received his B.S. from the University of Victoria and a Ph.D. in management information systems from the University of British Columbia. He was an expert in information technology innovation, IT hedonic price indexes, and online commerce. His research has been published in Information Systems Research and the Economics of Innovation and New Technology. Iain Cockburn (“ Information Technology and Intangible Output: The Impact of IT Investment on Innovation Productivity ”) is a professor of strategy and innovation in the Boston University School of Management and is a research associate of National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His research interests include intellectual property, management of innovation, and the economics of the life sciences sector. Faiz Currim (“ Modeling Spatial and Temporal Set-Based Constraints During Conceptual Database Design ”) is with the department of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona. Prior to working at Arizona, he was on the faculty at University of Iowa. His research interests include applications in database design and management, conceptual data modeling, data privacy and security, and XML Schema management. Wenjing Duan (“ Research Note: To Continue or Not to Continue Sharing? An Empirical Analysis of User Decision in Peer-to-Peer Sharing Networks ”) is an assistant professor of information systems at the George Washington University. She received her Ph.D. in information systems from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests glide the intersections between information systems, economics, and marketing. She has published in MIS Quarterly, Communications of ACM, the Journal of Retailing, and Decision Support Systems; she is also the recipient of the NET Institute Research Grant and serves as the associate editor of Decision Support Systems. George Duncan (“ The Halo Effect in Multicomponent Ratings and Its Implications for Recommender Systems: The Case of Yahoo! Movies ”) is a professor of statistics, emeritus in the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. His research centers on information technology and social accountability. He chaired the panel on confidentiality and data access of the National Academy of Sciences, resulting in the book Private Lives and Public Policies: Confidentiality and Accessibility of Government Statistics. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. David Fitoussi (“ IT Outsourcing Contracts and Performance Measurement ”) is an assistant professor at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, and a faculty research associate at the Center for Research on IT and Organizations. He holds a Ph.D in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Lucio Fuentelsaz (“ Switching Costs, Network Effects, and Competition in the European Mobile Telecommunications Industry ”) is a professor of strategic management at the University of Zaragoza. His primary research interest focuses on understanding competitive strategy decisions and their consequences on firm performance. In recent years, he has studied topics such as firm competitive dynamics, diffusion of innovations, and mergers and acquisitions. He is currently editor of Cuadernos de Economía y Dirección de la Empresa. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as the Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy, and the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. Nelson Granados (“ Online and Offline Demand and Price Elasticities: Evidence from the Air Travel Industry ”) is an assistant professor of information systems at the Graziadio School of Business and Management, Pepperdine University. He holds a Ph.D. in information and decision sciences, an M.S. and a Ph.D. minor in applied economics, and an MBA from the University of Minnesota. His research on information transparency was awarded Best IS Publication of the Year by senior scholars of the IS discipline and Best Publication of the Year by the Journal of the Association for Information Systems. Bin Gu (“ Research Note: The Impact of External Word-of-Mouth Sources on Retailer Sales of High-Involvement Products ”) is an assistant professor of information management at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin. He received a Ph.D. and an M.A. in operations and information management from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. His research interests are in user-generated contents, online social networks, virtual communities, e-commerce, and IT business value. He is a recipient of 2008 Information Systems Research Best Published Paper Award. Alok Gupta (“ Online and Offline Demand and Price Elasticities: Evidence from the Air Travel Industry ”) holds the Curtis L. Carlson Schoolwide Chair in Information Management at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. in management science and information systems from the University of Texas at Austin. He has published over 40 articles in the top management science, operations research, economics, and IS journals, and he received the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2001 for his research on online auctions. He serves on the editorial boards of Management Science, Information Systems Research, the Journal of Management Information Systems, and Decision Support Systems. Vijay Gurbaxani (“ IT Outsourcing Contracts and Performance Measurement ”) is the Taco Bell Endowed Professor and director of the Center for Research on IT and Organizations at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. He received a master's degree in mathematics and computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Rochester. His research has appeared in Information Systems Research, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, and Communications of the ACM. Yun Huang (“ Research Note: To Continue or Not to Continue Sharing? An Empirical Analysis of User Decision in Peer-to-Peer Sharing Networks ”) is a research associate in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. in management science and information systems from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on social network analysis, individual behavior in e-commerce applications, and recommender systems. His work has appeared in the Communications of the ACM, New Media & Society, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, and ACM/IEEE proceedings. Sora Kang (“ Research Note: A Multilevel Analysis of the Effect of Group Appropriation on Collaborative Technologies Use and Performance ”) is currently an assistant professor for the Division of Digital Business, Hoseo University. She has a Ph.D. from the Ewha Womans University in management information systems. Her research interests include adoption and performance of IT, organizational politics and knowledge management, and organizational impact of information technology. Her papers have appeared in the Journal of Computer Information Systems, the International Journal of Business Studies, Information: An International Interdisciplinary Journal, and the Business Management Review. Karthik N. Kannan (“ Effects of Information Revelation Policies Under Cost Uncertainty ”) is an assistant professor of management at Purdue University's Krannert School of Management. He earned his Ph.D. in information systems, M. Phil. in public policy and management, and M.S. in electrical and computer engineering, all from Carnegie Mellon University. His current research focuses on markets and pricing of information goods/servic