The practitioner perspective

The Information Systems (IS) discipline traces its origins to issues that were of interest to 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. Journals like MIS Quarterly Executive target this segment exclusively. In this, they complement non-IS journals and magazines in the broader business and technology spheres that also have practitioners in mind, including: Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, Communications of the ACM, McKinsey Quarterly, Academy of Management Perspectives, CIO Magazine, etc. Moreover, some of the existing journals that are predominantly focused on publishing theoretical contributions, for example, the journals that make up the Association of Information Systems' College of Senior Scholars list of eleven premier journals, have also demonstrated that they are open to practitioner-oriented submissions. The Information Systems Journal (ISJ) has for several years championed the publication of what we call Practitioner Papers (PPs). PPs can contribute to knowledge in a number of different ways, but one of our key objectives in promoting PPs is to further the dialogue between academia and practice. As part of this dialogue, PPs should provide deep insights for researchers into the practitioner's experience with IS in a particular context, as well as, of course, prescriptive and actionable recommendations for practice based on well executed research. Insights for practice may include reframing or reimagining specific practitioner problems, offering a thorough exploration of a phenomenon, documenting lessons learned by practitioners, or illustrating good practices and their outcomes. To render these insights actionable, these articles will include action-oriented prescriptions that suggest what practitioners should do differently in practice. While practitioners are the primary intended audience of PPs, academic researchers may also benefit, for instance when PPs engage with new phenomena and propose new insights that challenge and extend the existing discourse. Such outcomes can inspire future academic work to re-examine those prior findings, perhaps as part of the researcher's problematisation of the phenomenon (Chatterjee & Davison, 2021). Although practitioners are commonly thought of as working in or for organisations, we recognise that practitioners can be found in diverse settings and may not necessarily be serving a corporate entity. We can find practitioners in the political spectrum (i.e., lawmakers), non-governmental organisations, charities, villages, and communities. They may be formally employed, working as activists, or simply citizens with an interest in using IS to make the world a better place (Walsham, 2012). Submissions in the PP genre at the ISJ have been sporadic and the quality has varied. Examples of published PPs are Tamm et al. (2022) and Tim et al. (2021), while Pan and Pee (2020) offer a framework for demonstrating the impact of research on practice. To further encourage the undertaking of practitioner-oriented research, we have recently both reformulated our PP guidelines and announced a special issue that focuses exclusively on practice. Our aim is to spur further practitioner-oriented work. As with regular research articles, PPs could be written about a wide range of topics within the broad IS domain. Like all premier journals, we seek to publish cutting edge research that advances knowledge in the IS domain. Thus, we do not intend that PPs be used as a vehicle for teaching cases, or low quality (rejected) research articles that have