Revealing a Research Agenda: An Interdisciplinary Perspective to Strengthen IS Research on Boundary Spanning

The concerns that the identity of the IS discipline is unstable and there is a crisis in the discipline are viewed by some scholars to be a consequence of IS researchers’ tendency to under-investigate the subject matter that is at the core of the IS discipline and over-investigate phenomena that are argued not to be the central concern of the IS discipline. In this paper we engage with different perspectives that not only question the notion of a disciplinary crisis but suggest that the IS discipline, by considering a diversity of ideas and viewpoints regarding the subject areas being studied, is appropriately settled in a polycentric state. We take further these perspectives in proposing that IS research focus, rather than being ‘disciplined’ by self-imposed boundaries, should be determined by the significant problems of IS practitioners. Such organisational problems cut across disciplinary boundaries and we, therefore, suggest that interdisciplinarity in IS research is much needed to improve the vision and perceptiveness needed to identify and uncover interesting and useful research opportunities. We attempt to do so by first, adopting an inter-disciplinary perspective for developing a research agenda for understanding the work of IS practitioners in boundary roles and next, by outlining how the proposed research agenda may be operationalised into specific research questions for understanding the boundary spanning practices of business analysts. We conclude with discussing some implications of the proposed agenda for inter-disciplinary research and practice.