Information Technology and Organizational Contexts: Orienting Our Work Along Key Dimensions

The locus of the Information Systems discipline is at the intersection of organizations, people, and those technologies and systems specifically related to the acquisition, storage, analysis, interpretation, and communication of data. However, much of the published research is trifurcated, emphasizing one dimension and virtually ignoring the others. We argue that a deeper understanding of and an appropriate emphasis on the technological dimension, the information technology artifact, will significantly benefit research in the discipline. By doing this in a manner that explicitly recognizes the organizational and human contexts, we will better orient our work toward the needs of our various constituencies. We look at two specific examples of potentially rich areas of enquiry: workflow management and the semantic Web. Using a design science paradigm, we describe how these two can serve as exemplars to address the key research concerns of the discipline. We conclude by discussing the roles that authors, journals, and the discipline itself can play in addressing the challenges that are presented