Adding Practitioner Scholars to Our Faculties

At the same time the IT discipline is facing a challenge to the relevance of its scholarship, we also face a severe shortfall of professors. This shortfall is a long term problem that will have to be met through the use of substitutes for the conventional PhD graduate. This article argues that developing mid-career, top caliber IT professionals in "practitioner scholar" doctoral programs can help solve both problems. Practitioner scholars engage in research that is both audience-focused and academically rigorous. Faculty trained in this way can also bring balance to the classroom, avoiding the extremes of strictly academic or practitioner focused education. As IT researchers ponder the question of relevance, an answer to another pressing problem may help provide an answer. Given the findings of Freeman, et al. in the September 2000 issue of MIS Quarterly [Freeman et al., 2000] that the shortage of faculty in our discipline "is structural, persistent and not a short-term anomaly", the IT faculty world will need, somehow, to expand significantly in the coming years. The growing demands of our institutions and students, their customers, calls for more IT faculty. Barring structural changes in the way Business Schools are funded, such expansion will likely not come from ever-larger numbers of traditionally trained academics with full-time appointments. If we employ substitutes, as Freeman, et al. suggest we must, who will these people be? How will they be educated? What will they focus their intellectual powers on? Indeed, how we expand our ranks in the coming years may well impact the relevance of our research. Today, it would appear that faculty in many IT programs come in two basic flavors doctorally qualified academic full-timers who teach and conduct research and a growing cast of masters level and some PhD’s from industry working as part-time adjuncts that teach all the sections full-timers can't hope to cover. Both have their place. Part-timers bring a dose of reality, and vitality, to the classroom but in so doing risk teaching "for the moment" and not instilling lifelong intellectual frameworks in students. Academic full-timers focus on the latter, but have the unenviable task of trying to keep current in an emerging field, conducting meaningful basic research and, in too many cases, teaching overloads. As noted by others in the recent ISWORLD dialogue, consider the typical reading material and conference attendance of these two groups. Many academic full timers focus their reading on journals like MIS Quarterly and ISR. AMCIS, DSI and ICIS are likely their favorite conferences. Part-time adjuncts and their industry colleagues, however, may focus on publications such as Information Week and ComputerWorld and attend Comdex and other industry shows. While there will always be exceptional people in both camps that cross over, how many of us truly keep one foot in the academic world and the other in the IT industry? It is as though there are two largely Communications of the Association for Information Systems (Volume 6, 2001) 30-32 31 Adding Practitioner Scholars to our Faculties by A. Borchers disconnected IT research worlds an academically focused basic research world and an applied world. Is there a middle ground between the two extremes? Where can basic and applied research meet? We may want to observe the growing interest in a "practitioner scholar research model". It has been advanced by, among others, J. Aram and Paul Salipante of Case Western. Their approach is problem initiated, audience-centered research that retains a theoretical base and attention to validity. Such research is epistemologically open including a mix of methods and knowledge building and testing. Case Western incorporates this model in their EDM (Executive Doctor of Management) degree that may well be a model for training a new cadre of IT faculty. There are other examples. The University of Maryland (University Center) offers a 60-hour, Doctor of Management program aimed at mid-career professionals. At Claremont Graduate University the School of Information Science actively caters to a part-time PhD audience and attracts many students who work full time to a rigorous program in IS. In addition, Claremont runs an Executive PhD program in its Drucker Graduate School of Management.The thought is this what if we provide doctoral level education to a group of successful, top flight IT professionals? The graduates of such education may choose to switch to academic life or remain in industry. In either case, this group of individuals could initiate "practitioner scholar" research with high levels of relevance and academic rigor. Such research would be of vital interest to both the academic and practitioner communities. While some of today's PhD students have industry experience, the thought here is to attract truly top professionals system architects, CIO's, project managers and the like with extensive industry experience. Doctoral education for this group of individuals cannot be done in traditional full-time PhD programs. The pressures of career and family would prevent most of these professionals from pursuing this sort of doctoral education. Part-time programs that retain rigor, but are scheduled to fit into busy lives are in order. The choice of degree titles (DM or DBA versus PhD) can help keep clear the difference between traditional academics and the new wave of "practitioner scholars". Could such a genre of doctorally qualified faculty members and industry colleagues groomed in the practitioner scholar approach bring about increased relevance in IT research? Could such a group help educate a new generation of IT professionals that are better equipped for a life of learning and for immediate employment? The answers to these questions are not clear. Indeed, some experimentation with practitioner scholar based education may be in order. But in any case our critical shortage of IT faculty has to be met in some way. The way we go about filling this shortage may well speak volumes to the relevance of the research turned out by our discipline in the coming decades.