Research Commentary: Desperately Seeking the “IT” in IT Research—A Call to Theorizing the IT Artifact

TLDR

Information systems research centers on information technology’s role in everyday socio‑economic life, yet the field has largely neglected the IT artifact itself, which is critical for understanding a world saturated with ubiquitous, interdependent, and emergent technologies. The authors propose a new research direction that urges IS scholars to treat technology with the same seriousness as its effects, context, and capabilities. They suggest that researchers explicitly theorize about IT artifacts and incorporate those theories into their studies. A decade‑long review of Information Systems Research shows that scholars focus on context, processing capabilities, or dependent variables, while the IT artifact itself often disappears from view, is taken for granted, or assumed unproblematic once installed.

Abstract

The field of information systems is premised on the centrality of information technology in everyday socio-economic life. Yet, drawing on a review of the full set of articles published in Information Systems Research (ISR) over the past ten years, we argue that the field has not deeply engaged its core subject matter—the information technology (IT) artifact. Instead, we find that IS researchers tend to give central theoretical significance to the context (within which some usually unspecified technology is seen to operate), the discrete processing capabilities of the artifact (as separable from its context or use), or the dependent variable (that which is posited to be affected or changed as technology is developed, implemented, and used). The IT artifact itself tends to disappear from view, be taken for granted, or is presumed to be unproblematic once it is built and installed. After discussing the implications of our findings, we propose a research direction for the IS field that begins to take technology as seriously as its effects, context, and capabilities. In particular, we propose that IS researchers begin to theorize specifically about IT artifacts, and then incorporate these theories explicitly into their studies. We believe that such a research direction is critical if IS research is to make a significant contribution to the understanding of a world increasingly suffused with ubiquitous, interdependent, and emergent information technologies.