Information Systems and Business & Information Systems Engineering: Status Quo and Outlook

Although both communities share a common object of research, the Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) community from the German-speaking countries and the Information Systems (IS) community centered in North America have developed quite differently. The BISE community features promote connections with industry, attractive topics to students and practical relevance of publications. But due to various reasons numerous BISE researchers struggle with publications in top-ranked journals. While this weakness obviously is a strength of the IS community, we observe that the IS community struggles with its industry connections and enrollment numbers. What the global IS/BISE community needs is a more intense discourse that increases mutual understanding, creates awareness for the need for complementation, and ensures that the opportunity for complementation is seized. This paper offers insights on how by complementation both communities could mitigate some of their weaknesses and the global IS/BISE community could increase its success as a whole.