Reengineering IS Research and Its Intellectual Infrastructure for the Electronic Economy

The emerging electronic economy is bringing with it rapid advances in open networks and information technology (IT) capabilities, increasing global complexity and interdependence, and increasingly short business cycle times. Many enterprises are reengineering the way they carry out their business to take advantage of these new conditions. In this article, we contend that it is also time for information systems (IS) academics to fundamentally rethink the IS research process and the intellectual infrastructure that enables it in light of these new conditions. We first examine why the current IS research process needs to be changed. We then systematically analyze needed change along 6 dimensions. The change potentials are used to propose an IS research paradigm that is based on interactive knowledge repositories and collaborative electronic networks. We propose a new intellectual infrastructure that is based on a new type of IT-enabled electronic space for the research community, which we term a cybrarium. A cybrarium is focused not only on the storage and dissemination but also on the synthesis of knowledge generated in the research community. We articulate the basic distinctions between electronic Web journals and cybrariums and show how a cybrarium leads to a fundamentally changed research process. We contend that such a redefined research process and its underlying intellectual infrastructure will enable the IS research community to make the transition to a large-scale global collaborative alliance that is faster, more forward looking, and cumulative.