Challenges in learning and improving continuously

The European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) is among the best in the field, and all of us – the editorial board and the EJIS community – should be proud of it. We should also be willing to do what it takes in order to make it even better. At this time, I can think of at least two areas for improvement. First, we need to improve the process of turning submissions into published papers, and we need to make this improvement quickly and continuously. Second, we need to improve continuously the published product and the way it serves and affects the EJIS community. These improvements involve the entire EJIS community but, notably, require an effort from the members of the editorial board. Let me explain by first taking stock of some recent efforts to improve the journal and then raising some challenges in order to solicit suggestions for how to meet the challenges. I concentrate on a few tasks that we can begin in the near future and leave a comprehensive analysis of our goals for another occasion. Every editorial board of EJIS, since its inception, has strived to define the journal's mission and practice and, accordingly, to advance the journal. Many of these efforts are documented in editorials and are evident in established practices of the editorial board. In their inaugural editorial, Liebenau & Smithson (1991) envisioned a forum of academic debate on the impact of IT on 'the daily activities of individuals, organizations and societies'. They planned to realize this with a European flavor, insisting on a diversity of people, topics and methods and on relevance to the interests of the readership. Indeed, prominent in recent EJIS statements the repeated call for diversity in almost every aspect of the journal (Baskerville & The board today consists of 57 members affiliated to universities in 18 countries on 6 continents. Although the journal publishes only in English, the board members speak many languages and represent a pluralistic cultural background. They do research in many genres on a broad set of IS-related topics. As a result, the journal is able to publish a diverse selection of papers that cover most of the IS research genres on a very wide spectrum of IS topics. A forthcoming special issue on alternative genres underscores our plans to extend the current set of genres even further. Diversity brings with it certain managerial challenges at …