IS Research Methods

The artifact is only the vehicle. The contribution is what we learn from building and evaluating it.

IS research is built on fragile survey designs, PLS-SEM misuse, and TAM studies that rarely replicate. It is time we said this out loud.

AI tools offload thinking, and the people using them lose the very capacity they need to evaluate whether the output is any good. This is not an individual prob...

McKinsey puts the automation midpoint at 2045. We are in 2026. That nineteen-year gap is not just calendar time -- it is the sociotechnical distance between a c...

IBM's 2024 report puts the average breach cost at $4.88 million. As an IS researcher, the number I can't stop thinking about is $9.77 million in healthcare, for...

ISC2 reports a 4.76 million person cybersecurity gap while the existing workforce stagnates. For the first time, budget, not talent, is the top barrier.

McKinsey puts the transformation failure rate at 70%. Only 16% improve performance and sustain it. IS research is very good at predicting adoption and much quie...

Gartner puts worldwide AI spending at $2.5 trillion for 2026. The number is real. Whether it produces commensurate value is a different and harder question.

Gartner says 63% of organizations have started implementing zero trust. Only 10% will have a mature program by 2026. The gap between those two numbers is an IS ...

Action research asks you to help solve a real problem while studying it. The dual role is genuinely difficult, and the rigor vs. relevance tension never fully r...

Economists study macro displacement. IS researchers can study what actually happens inside organizations when AI changes specific jobs, roles, and power structu...

AI models predict patterns in observed data but never access the generative mechanisms that produce them. Critical realism tells us why that ceiling is not a te...

Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects canceled by 2027. The pattern looks a lot like ERP in the 1990s, and the failure mode is the same.

IS research methods assume technology is stable and humans adapt. AI inverts that assumption, and our methods have not caught up.

AI agents that plan, act, and iterate without human input are moving into enterprise deployment. The accountability questions this raises do not have clean answ...

IS loves case studies and sometimes misuses them. Robert Yin's framework tells you exactly when a case study is the right choice and what rigor looks like in th...

Podsakoff et al. (2003) documented how collecting both variables from the same person at the same time inflates correlations artificially. This is still one of ...

I rolled my eyes when a study partner said critical realism was important. Three reads later I apologized, at least internally.

Critical realism says reality has layers we cannot fully observe, and most IS research ignores the deepest one.

The global cybersecurity workforce gap reached 4.76 million in 2024, and for the first time, budget, not talent, is the leading cause.

Building a working artifact is necessary but not sufficient for design science research. The real question is whether your artifact produces generalizable knowl...

Hevner et al. (2004) argued that IS should not only explain and predict but also build and evaluate artifacts. Twenty years later, the paper still shapes how we...

A handful of US and Chinese companies control most of the internet's infrastructure. IS research still treats Western organizational contexts as the default.

Compliance asks 'are we allowed to do this?' Ethics asks 'should we do this?' In most organizations, the first question is answered and the second is never aske...

McKinsey puts the long-term digital transformation success rate at 16%. After studying this for years, I think the number is stubborn for a specific reason.

Endogeneity biases OLS estimates in ways that make conclusions systematically wrong. IS research has significant exposure that is underacknowledged.

Ethnography means embedding yourself in a setting long enough to see what is really happening, not the version people perform for a survey.

Gartner puts global IT spending at $5.43 trillion in 2025, growing to $6.31 trillion in 2026. IS researchers study the most consequential investment category in...

Glaser and Strauss said to let theory emerge from data, not from prior frameworks. IS researchers often invoke grounded theory while doing something considerabl...

Gartner coined hyperautomation to describe end-to-end automation of any automatable process. Most organizations are still struggling to automate one process wel...

Academic publishing in IS is slow, opaque, and high-stakes. Understanding the game is as important as doing good research.

Going through an IS PhD program has been genuinely valuable. It has also revealed some consistent gaps between what the curriculum covers and what doing IS rese...

The things I wish someone had said to me before I started: about reading, theory, reviewers, advisors, and the strange valley you fall into around year two.

IS draws its theories from economics, sociology, psychology, and computer science. The result is a discipline with a persistent identity problem and an unusual ...

DeLone and McLean built the most cited IS success model for transactional systems. Most software today is something else entirely.

IS research is supposed to matter to both academics and practitioners. In practice, two separate conversations are happening with almost no crossover.

The productivity paradox asked why IT spending didn't show up in productivity data. The answer turned out to be about capability, not spending.

Most IS research uses cross-sectional data collected at one point in time. That design cannot establish causation or capture how effects evolve.

McKinsey's GenAI economic potential estimate is real and grounded in methodology. The way it gets used in boardrooms strips out the conditions that make it mean...

When IS researchers compare survey results across groups, they assume the constructs mean the same thing to everyone. Most papers never test this. The test is c...

Some IS research questions cannot be answered with quantitative or qualitative methods alone. Mixed methods combines both, intentionally.

Metcalfe's Law, two-sided markets, and the chicken-and-egg problem are not just business stories. They are IS research problems about sociotechnical infrastruct...

Nick Srnicek's platform capitalism framework explains how companies extract value by controlling infrastructure. IS researchers can study what this does to work...

The debate over which SEM approach to use in IS research has run for decades and produces more heat than light. Here is what actually matters.

Rigor in qualitative IS research is contested and often reduced to one number: intercoder reliability. That number matters but it is not the whole story, and so...

The quant-versus-qual fight in IS research is the most tribal and the most misunderstood. The actual debate is about paradigms, not methods.

A large-scale effort to replicate psychology findings triggered a reckoning across social sciences. IS research is not immune, and the field has a long way to g...

Most IS papers are improvements dressed as inventions. Sun et al. say you need novelty, rigor, and relevance, not two out of three.

IS survey research defaults to Likert-type scales without much thought. The choices made about scale design shape what respondents report and how results can be...

A systematic literature review uses explicit, reproducible criteria to select and synthesize research. The point is to minimize the selection bias of traditiona...

IS research lives between computer science and management. Here is what I have found useful and what I think the field gets wrong about technical skills.

Cambridge Analytica. The Facebook Papers. Recommendation algorithms and radicalization. IS researchers studying social media cannot pretend these are side effec...

IS research tests existing theory more than it builds new theory. There is value in testing. But after hundreds of TAM extensions, we should be honest about how...

Mohr warned us in 1982 that variance and process theories answer different questions and need different evidence. Most IS research still evaluates process stori...

Technically correct IS papers fail all the time. The difference between a paper that passes review and one that advances the field is harder to name than it sou...

A digital object is more than code on a server. Faulkner and Runde show that bit strings occupy social positions with rights and responsibilities, and that chan...

Positivist, interpretive, and critical realist research each carry assumptions about what is real and how we can know it. None of them is just a method choice.