While information technology is fundamentally transforming industry after industry, the academic field of information systems is, to a large extent, buried under filing cabinets, shelves of books, piles of journals, and regional phone directories. In this essay, I explain why the MIS Quarterly will accept Watson's challenge and describe how we intend to do so. Publishing versus Scholarship Publishing, be it on paper or in electronic form, is not the raison d'etre of a scholar. Rather, a scholar's foremost objective is the creation of new knowledge. Publishing is a byproduct.
Publishing is the means traditionally used to document new knowledge at a point in time.
A scholar's second objective is dissemination of knowledge. Publications, long a major component of the knowledge dissemination process, will become increasingly less important as people learn from doing rather than reading and as information becomes more and more dynamic. In essence, producing byproduct publications can hinder rather than facilitate the scholarly process. New electronic infrastructure will provide new means to demonstrate that new knowledge has been created. But we must first learn how.