MISQ Research Curations

The success of platforms such as Amazon, Alibaba, Google, Uber, Netflix and Facebook has generated great interest. There is now a large body of research in MIS Quarterly on platforms (and the closely associated concept of ecosystems). This curation brings readers up to date on the nature of research on platforms and ecosystems in MIS Quarterly, the major topics covered, and thematic advances over time.

The ubiquity of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has generated growing enthusiasm for its prospects to contribute to human development. At the same time, this pervasiveness also carries the potential for unfavorable outcomes. The implications of ICTs on society constitute a complex and multidimensional phenomenon with ambiguous boundaries and often unintended consequences. In this curated collection on the societal implications of ICTs, we include studies focused on scrutinizing the consequences of digital technology on enabling or constraining different aspects of people’s lives, such as access to health and education services, economic opportunities, political participation, civic engagement, gender equality, and environmental sustainability.

In our modern, digital world, the critical role of information technology makes data management an important research topic. This paper curates data management research at MIS Quarterly as it has progressed from its early context of understanding requirements of relatively simple information systems to the sophisticated and complex systems of today. We discuss different themes of data management, and the progression of research on data management over time.

Since the inception of the MIS Quarterlyin the 1970s, collaboration has been an important topic for IS researchers. The GSS and GDSS labs in the University of Arizona and University of Minnesota gave rise to a wave of studies examining how IT-mediated collaboration can substitute for, and in some contexts, even surpass traditional face-to-face collaboration.

Online word-of-mouth (WOM) has been an important area of scholarly inquiry at the intersection between Internet technologies and marketing (where the concept of offline WOM was born). Though there is no consensus around what it refers to, we define online (or electronic) WOM as any statements publicly available on the Internet that are made by individuals about any object of their interest (e.g., a product, a seller, stock market, a political figure or event).

Since the inception of MISQ in 1977, information systems (IS) control and governance have been, and continue to be, vibrant research streams of key interest to the IS discipline. While both IS control and governance are concerned with ensuring the alignment of IS-related activities and information technology (IT) artifacts and resources (including human resources) with an organization’s objectives and strategy, the two are often viewed as operating at different levels; with IS governance focusing on alignment mechanisms at the meso level and IS control focusing on managerial alignment mechanisms at the micro level.

IT project management has long been a key area of interest among IS scholars and practitioners, since IT projects constitute a key vehicle for IS development and implementation. A project can be defined as an interrelated set of activities intended to accomplish certain desired objectives within a limited period of time, typically executed by a project team. IT projects involve developing and/or deploying IT artifacts (comprised of either software, hardware, or both). IT project management thus refers to the application of knowledge, skills, techniques, and processes to conduct such projects within agreed-upon parameters (e.g., budget, schedule, scope, quality), and in concert with organizational goals and priorities.

IS researchers have devoted significant attention to the IT workforce since the inception of MIS Quaterly (Jenkins and Johnson 1977). From 1977 to 2017, MIS Quarterly has published 76 articles that have employed diverse methods for examining the individual, organizational, and market issues tied to staffing the IT function in an organization. These studies illuminate not only how changing technologies and market conditions affect demand for the skills and competencies of IT professionals, but also how …

The alignment of Information Systems (IS) with the business (i.e., hereafter IS alignment) has been a top managerial concern for over 30 years and remains an ongoing research stream of key interest to the IS discipline. IS alignment[1] represents an emergent process of dynamic interactions and continual adjustments between business and IS across multiple organizational dimensions (e.g., strategic, operational and social) and also organizational levels (e.g., the organization itself, group level, and the individual level) that collectively can potentially result in greater organizational performance