AIS Award Winners Discuss the Future of IS

AIS recognizes talent and dedication through our peer-reviewed publications and various award programs. Each year we have the opportunity to recognize those who have exhibited their commitment to the discipline with the presentation of the LEO and Fellow Awards. Those who are fortunate enough to be selected by a group of their peers to receive this recognition are among the best in the field.  Here we are featuring the perspectives of some these outstanding scholars.  Click  here for a complete list of all of these winners.

Here’s to these award winners who have raised the bar of accomplishment by their sacrifice, dedication, and determination. May they be an inspiration to us all.

Enjoy!

Pete Tinsley, CAE
Executive Director
___________________________________________________________________________________________________

What do you believe is the most compelling change within the discipline in the last five years, and how do you see that impacting the future of the field?

Soon Ang: A greater integration of behavioral, economics, and technical foundations within the discipline in the last five years.  

Because of the ubiquity of digital technologies in our work and home, I see a strong resurgence of interest in and need for technology intelligence and digital fluency -- in education, in businesses, in innovation, and in healthcare.

Alan Dennis: As long as I've been a professor, teaching has been about standing in a classroom talking to students who are studying for degrees, and research has been about producing a 30-page paper. I think we've reached a tipping point, where Internet technologies are going to bring dramatic changes to what both teaching and research looks like. MOOCs will increase and enrollment in degree-oriented courses will decline (at least at the graduate level); the way we approach teaching and learning in an era of ubiquitous rich communication will require us to re-think what we mean by education.  Likewise, new technology will enable us to present new forms of scholarship, so we will no longer need to think of research as being bound to that old-fashioned 30-page black and white paper.  I don't know what future research will look like, but the same way the printing press transformed knowledge sharing from an oral tradition to a written tradition, I believe new technology will transform our current written tradition into something else.

Detmar Straub: The most exciting change in IT in the last five years has been
the application of neuroscience tools to traditional information systems problems,
in my opinion.  These tools give us complementary insights into how humans interact
with systems and this is extremely interesting.

It could very well change the way we look at the dynamism of the human-computer interface.

Ann Majchrzak: The most compelling change in the last five years for the discipline, I believe, is the speed with which new affordances of technology are introduced into the work, consumer, and public space (e.g., hi-tech companies producing a new social network platform, new ways of funding projects,  new ways of analyzing large scale data, new ways to hack and avoid hacking, etc.).  This means that the organizational practices to be coupled with these new technology affordances are constantly struggling to catch up.  For example, it's no longer clear what is a virtual organization, community or virtual team given that fluidity provided by these technology affordances.  For me this means that as academics we need to find a balance between integrating current technology affordances into our theories and identifying  underlying theoretical mechanisms that explain sociotechnical behavior for classes of technology affordances.   This is hard work to find the balance.