Panel: The credibility crisis in IS

A credibility crisis continues to plague the Information Systems (IS) discipline. For almost a decade, IS has struggled to obtain and maintain its stature as a highly-respected academic discipline. The recent demise of several IS programs around the world highlights the credibility crisis, as departments have been subsumed into other business disciplines, or worse yet, abandoned entirely. In a recent MIS Quarterly article, Gill and Bhattacherjee (2009) highlight some of the challenges facing IS: low student enrollments, research that is rarely discussed in our classrooms, and research that fails to make an impact in practice. While useful tactics in terms of research (Dennis et al., 2008), student recruitment (Koch and Kayworth, 2009; Looney and Akbulut, 2007), and pedagogy (Firth et al., 2008) have surfaced in the literature, a holistic strategy for addressing the credibility crisis has yet to emerge. This panel brings together a group of IS professors to offer their perspectives on a series of propositions about the Credibility Crisis in the IS Discipline, and engage in an animated debate with each other and the audience on their positions.