Toward an IT Agenda

knowledge is the foundation for a community of specialists who offer their expertise to the lay public [Abbott, 1988]. For IT, that abstract knowledge is already claimed by computer science, as implied in Figure 3. Such instances are not unique [Abbott, 1988]. In established professions, such as medicine and engineering, there is a derivational chain of legitimacy from professional practice ―upwards‖ to its supporting abstract knowledge. Tracing that derivation for IT runs into a roadblock; the corresponding abstract knowledge is in the agenda of another discipline, namely CS. In short, IT runs into a dominant discipline. In a way that could not be anticipated, Figure 3 serves to illustrate this phenomenon, with IT pushing its abstractions to the left, only to find its relevant theories already claimed by CS. Even with the dominant abstract-knowledge position of CS with respect to IT, the following three strategies may guide the articulation of a more distinctively IT research agenda:  Seize on jurisdictional vacancies. By jurisdiction is meant the extent to which there is a defined practitioner community that has control over its activities, namely, who practices, how they are educated and trained, what activities are included, and how practices are performed. Jurisdiction is the ―defining relation in professional life‖ [Abbott, 1988, p. 3], referring to establishing control over practice that is rooted in a body of abstract knowledge. While, admittedly, Abbott was examining the patterns of jurisdiction in professions, this notion of vacancy is relevant to fields of study that are not professions: ―Competition between academic disciplines is fundamentally similar to that between law, medicine, accounting, and the rest‖ [Abbott, 2001, p. 137]. Vacancies appear because of new knowledge and practice, and also because ―... an earlier tenant has left them altogether or lost its firm grip on them‖ [Abbott, 1988, p. 3]. Such is the case with IT artifacts, which are a vacancy for both reasons. As confirmed in [National Research Council, 2009], the growing number, diversity, and complexity of existing IT artifacts is challenging professional practice to understand their properties, deploy them most effectively, and bring them together to interoperate as part of infrastructure and service-delivery systems. Appendix B summarizes analytical studies and opinions that IT artifacts have not been prominent in IS research. And this relative inattention to IT artifacts may be seen as part of a broader pattern of IS research not engaging with IS practice [Gill and Bhattacherjee, 2009, p. 228]. ―A profession that has yet to grow out of a limited area of work, possibly in tutelage under a dominant profession, will strengthen its current jurisdictions if it wins a new jurisdiction that justifies and encourages its developing a more abstract foundation‖ [Abbott, 1988, p. 104]. Through investigations of artifacts, IT can fill a jurisdictional vacancy in the milieu of computing and information science disciplines.  Abstract from current practice. Given that IT is blocked by CS from the top-down (abstraction to practice), one approach to building a research agenda is bottom-up, from practice. This strategy is consistent with the way new populations address the learning issue as they attempt to carve out a niche for themselves by developing ―... their own organized knowledge structures through experience, and they use those structures as templates—schemata—to give information form and meaning‖ [Aldrich, 1999]. There is an opportunity to coalesce around core IT practice areas that can benefit from focused research leading to more theoretical treatments and the establishment of more abstract knowledge. While IT is anchored to the right-hand-side of Figure 3, with users and real systems, it does not imply that IT necessarily lacks rigor or can‘t be helped by abstractions. The IT region can advance to the left, reflecting how IT professionals make sense of technologies by developing frameworks and constructs that provide order and rationale. One path toward strengthening the research component of the IT agenda is to pursue modeling and abstraction to establish principles with broad applicability. Increasingly complex global enterprise architectures, providing both infrastructure and strategic advantage, stand out as opportunities for exploration and inquiry.  Strengthen theoretical ties with the systems sciences as a reference discipline. If we revisit the computing space, a principal underlying reason for the much stronger research foundations for the disciplines on the