What's communication got to do with IT?

¹Co-Editor

This is my first opportunity as editor to address the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) community, and I take great pleasure in doing so. We are a diverse community of readers, authors, reviewers and editors. Indeed, cultivating diversity of research methods and topics, presentation genres, cultures and norms is a hallmark of this community (see Editorials by Frantz Rowe (2010, 2011). Many of us wear different hats, switching between roles: one day an author, the other a reader, one day a reviewer, the other an editor. All these roles can, and indeed should, build on intellectual discourse and socialization that respect diversity. Today I look at what we can do to improve discourse and socialization. To me discourse is dialog with others in the community expressing thoughts and emotions, generating perspectives of situations and phenomena, moving across levels of context of a perspective, moving from simplifications to complications and from concrete to abstract descriptions, and using representations with various formats and lexicons to do so. Socialization is learning about each other and learning how to interact with each other in the community.

New communication technologies, not the least social media, are changing the way we process information, learn, make decisions, create and distribute knowledge, manage, and socialize, all of which have been traditional areas of our research in Information Systems. Advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) affect not only what we study, but also how we study, communicate and share knowledge. The changes brought about by new ICT sometimes appear to affect behaviors quickly and abruptly, as in the use of social media in the recent Arab political uprisings. But at other times, the changes seem unwieldy and painfully slow in affecting, for instance, the design of systems to support knowledge dissemination in our journal publishing and conferencing. Improving discourse and socialization in EJIS is strongly linked to advances in ICT and how the new technologies serve to create, disseminate and utilize knowledge.

Circles of discourse and socialization – changes needed

Imagine the EJIS community as many interrelated and overlapping circles, in which our members engage in discourse and socialization. The widest EJIS circle of discourse encompasses our authors and readers. In this circle, knowledge is printed or displayed online in the form of an authored article and then read; ideally the article is also discussed in this circle of discourse and the knowledge refined through dialog and further research. Other smaller circles include, for example, the editors and reviewers who discuss EJIS policies and culture and practices. Another even smaller circle could be a review panel and authors of a specific article developing it through rounds of structured reviews and unstructured discussions. And think of the circles outside EJIS that include or overlap with the EJIS community such as national IS societies (UKAIS, AIM, Wirtschafsinformatik, ItAIS and others) and the international associations such as the Association of IS (AIS). These external circles of discourse are the context in which EJIS operates within the broader European and International IS community.

Taking this view of the community as circles of discourse highlights the opportunities both for enriching discourse and socialization in each circle and for leveraging network effects by linking circles.

Some of the circles of discourse, such as the readership of journal articles, have traditionally restricted discourse to formal exchanges and predefined formats. Other circles in our community, such as conferences, facilitate less formal discourse, and are often designed to promote socialization among members of the community alongside intellectual discourse through informal meetings, social events, dinners, parties and so on. Communities of learning benefit from socialization that brings about trust and willingness to share knowledge. It may be useful, therefore, to support socialization in most, if not all, of our circles of discourse. And importantly, socialization tends to make the discourse more enjoyable.

While it is useful to extend support for each circle, it is also useful to revisit the bigger picture of the collection of circles. Research has shown that effective knowledge transfer requires different styles and forms of communication; I believe the different circles of discourse can provide the requisite variety. We should consider the entire range of circles in our community and think of complementarities and links between circles. Journals and conferences are today more intertwined and the boundaries between them have become blurred. For instance, at ECIS2012 in Barcelona, EJIS will hold an author workshop, host the editorial board and invite research presented at the conference to be developed further as journal papers. Furthermore, conference proceedings and journal articles residing on the same platform, for example, the AIS eLibrary, can integrate the production and consumption of knowledge from many circles of the broader IS community. ICT ease knowledge transfer between circles of discourse and reduce differences between them, but more can be done by enhancing and enriching the communication within each circle and the linkages between the circles.

At the same time, ICT are also complicating our discourse. In recent decades, particularly since the proliferation of Internet users, ICT have drastically reduced the barriers of geographical distances, enabling international and intercultural discourse between academics around the world. Our research of ICT may need to accommodate the requisite variety of topics we study by ourselves within IS or with collaborators from other disciplines. For this reason too we will need to examine how ICT can support the more complex discourse our authors, reviewers and readers will encounter.

And outside academic journals, the culture of reading has lately been changing rapidly, particularly in the last decade. Recent reports (by Nielsen and by Pew) show an accelerated use of e-books and social media, especially in the 18–34 age group. We should be planning for this generation, which is already a significant part of our community. The impression is that the young generation is also more in a hurry than the older generation and more prone to multi-tasking in their information processing and communication. I’m not sure whether it's the impatient youngsters who were so quick to adopt tweeting and type almost as quickly as the medium can transmit, or whether it's these rapid communication tools that make the younger generations more impatient with communication delays and slower feedback. The growing diversity and complexity of our intellectual discourse and the changing norms of communication require us at EJIS to re-examine our own communication and the ways ICT support it.

The IS community has explored some new forms of knowledge sharing in journals and conferences, and the following are some examples taken from Te’eni (2009). At ICIS2007 in Montreal, 20 researchers worked intensively to record and generate ideas that evolved during a session. The lecture slides and a Wiki, organized according to the slides and seeded with text, were available to the experts in advance. In the session, new ideas were placed on the Wiki and displayed to the audience on a second screen to enable multi-communicating. The Wiki was accessible for further extensions after the session. Thus, the experts and others in the audience co-created knowledge beyond the knowledge provided by the lecturer. Most of the expert users claimed it was too demanding to listen to the lecturer, assimilate the information, think of comments, read previous comments, place the comments on the Wiki, and remember to return to the lecture and the dialog in the room. The Wiki way was not meant to be done in a hurry.

Several longer-term efforts to disseminate knowledge have not survived. In 1995, MISQ Discovery used multimedia, video, interactivity, hypertext, live data and other online capabilities. This format died, was revived 10 years later but failed to attract submissions. On a much smaller scale, I created a hypertext version of an MISQ article hosted by MISQ that offered periodic updates and invitations for comments; I gave up 2 years later. ISPedia, a community equivalent of Wikipedia devoted to IT-related terms, went down in July 2008. The administration and content generation may have been too much for too few. In none of these efforts did we obtain a critical mass of contributors to sustain a viable source of knowledge. I believe it is primarily a problem of low incentives but high costs.

We have not been alone in these trials and tribulations, but now more journals and societies are trying and persisting. Clearly we will need to pay more attention to the behavioral, legal and economic aspects of ownership and incentives, which transcend technological challenges. Here are a few possibilities.

Author–reviewer circle of discourse. Let us assume the traditional review process in which a panel of reviewers and an editor interact with the author until a publication/no publication decision is made. The online management and exchange of materials within this circle of discourse already prevails in most journals, but some go further to enable almost direct (but anonymous) communication between author and reviewers unmediated by the editor. ICT make it feasible and efficient to engage in direct and timely discourse rather than wait for complete review-rounds to provide integrated reviews and then integrated responses. The ACM/CHI conference, for example, enables rebuttals from authors to reviewers before final publication decisions are made. The set of actors in the circle of discourse is the same, but the channels between the actors are more numerous and richer. There is a good chance that the richer and more immediate discourse will expedite the review process.

Pre-publication reviewing also refers to commentaries on papers under review that are accessible on the journal's Web site or some other platform such as arXiv.org. The commentaries come from readers at large with the hope that the authors can improve their articles and other readers can benefit too. ICT such as Google knol had made it feasible to broaden the circle of commentators beyond the sanctioned reviewer panel (see an experiment of MISQ in Hardaway & Scamell, 2012).

Ongoing discourse in the readers/authors circle. Several journals are attempting to support the discourse after publication. Readers are invited to submit comments to a blog alongside the online article, for example, the post-publication review in PLoS (Public Library of Science). It may be too early to judge but it appears that very few invest much energy in providing quality post-publication reviews. More frequently, controversial online articles attract many short and quick responses immediately after publication. In line with the growing expectation of instant communication, crowd wisdom is tweeted as post-publication reviews, occasionally with dramatic consequences: recalling the article after publication because of fatal flaws revealed in the ‘lightning’ review (Mandavilli, 2011). Thus, ICT let us go on beyond the one-way serial model of the readers of the journal doing the reading after the reviewer has done the reviewing to a model that supports discourse, including critical discourse, before and after the official moment of publication, a term that perhaps needs to be redefined in the online world. Unfortunately, the few attempts in the community to support discussions of pre-publications have not succeeded (Avital et al, 2009).

ICT also enable more interactive discourse. Some of us read printed articles; others read off the screen. For those reading the online version, ICT can be designed to support critical engagement that involves sense making, analysis and simulations of the ideas in the article, but also associations, comparisons and integration with knowledge in other repositories and circles of discourse (the Open Journal Systems has been developing reading tools to do this). Consider also the author in the process of writing, who accesses a repository built on the community's circles of discourse, and integrates relevant ideas into her writing. Interactivity and engagement in reading an article may drive readers to be more active in extending the discourse.

The tradition of academic journals is intellectual not social discourse; socializing is restricted to conferences. Why not develop the social aspect of communication as part of the EJIS culture too? We could start with showing pictures of authors and reviewers, using social media to encourage virtual interactions and following up with face-to-face activities at conferences.

Much can be done with ICT to enrich communication in circles of discourse and link circles to boost knowledge creation, dissemination and utilization. Yet, for some reason we, as a community, have been slow in leveraging the new technologies to redesign our practice. While technology can reduce the effort and time for effective discourse, it does not create the incentives to engage in discourse. Even within a publish-or-perish reward system, I believe there is room for more systematic intellectual discourse that does not register immediately on one's resume. I’d like to initiate a dialog in the EJIS community on how to make EJIS a better place for us all, starting with ideas on how to support and create the incentives for circles of discourse and socialization. We’ll use a trial platform for this dialog that could also be used later for conversing about articles. We could pick a few articles and get things going. Associate editors and reviewers could think of seed questions that would generate interesting discussions. We would expect authors to take part and other members of the community too. But I’m putting the cart before the horse; I want to hear from you. Let's talk at ejis-forum.com.

About this issue

There is nothing for me to add to the comprehensive introduction to this issue by our special guest editors Nancy Pouloudi, Angeliki Poulymenakou and Katerina Pramatari. They introduce the issue's six articles, most of which were first presented at the 2009 Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems (MCIS) and have since been developed with the help of our editorial team members. The introduction also tells the story of our colleagues in the Mediterranean. The story of course started a long time ago, when the Mediterranean served as a cradle of knowledge generation and diffusion throughout and beyond the Mediterranean empires of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Ottomans. Knowledge sharing was not always what it is today, although King Solomon's social network of over one thousand friends (albeit the dubious choice of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines) was probably the first documented use of social networks for strategic alliances. MCIS is an example of a rich and diverse circle of intellectual discourse and delightful socialization. Having participated in most of these and organized one, MCIS is close to my heart. And I’m delighted to see how it intertwines with the many other circles of EJIS.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the EJIS senior and associate editors for their untiring work; more power to you. I have already worked with many of you and look forward to meeting you all. I also thank my co-editors Richard and Frantz for breaking me in and supporting me.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ulrike Schultz, Michel Avital, Regis Meissonier, Nancy Pouloudi, Richard Baskerville and Frantz Rowe for their valuable comments.