ACIS 2007 Panel report: Lack of relevance in IS research

Relevance of IS research to practitioners has been one of the most fervently debated meta discussions in the IS discipline. To address the concern of lack of relevance, an IS relevance index was suggested in 2005 and used in an exploratory study using two years of conference review data. This paper reports on a 2007 panel presented at the Australasian Conference on Information Systems, which explored the idea of this IS relevance index and discussed openly the issue of lack of relevance in conducting, evaluating and presenting IS research. This paper first introduces the debate and the concept of an IS relevance index. Next, viewpoints of individual panel members are presented and finally the subsequent panel discussion is summarized.