BISE and the Engineering Sciences

The development of our journal in the last year has been very encouraging. We have received over 220 submissions from authors worldwide, and the ISI impact factor 2014 reached 1.7. Overall, the journal and the community are developing favorably and we appreciate the participation and impact of a new and outstanding generation of faculty members, which is important for a prospering community. While the field is growing, the list of research topics is also growing, which makes the core of our discipline harder to embrace and demarcate. For instance, the issue 6 of our journal last year featured two research notes and a discussion on ‘‘grand challenges’’ in BISE research (Becker et al. 2015; Barbian and Mertens 2015; Eymann et al. 2015). Apart from a broad collection of research challenges in both research notes, the article by Becker et al. (2015) also summarized challenges for the academic community. Some of the top-ranked challenges concern the identity of the discipline: identifying IS as an academic discipline, rethinking the theoretical foundations of the IS discipline, mastering the methodological breadth/richness, etc. These challenges are not surprising for a field which deals with information technology and information systems. 30 years ago, most BISE research was either rooted in software and data engineering within organizations, or in operations research. The technical developments over the past decades were so rapid that our community adopted many new topics and new methodologies. The range of topics published in our journal today ranges from business process management to electronic markets, social network analysis, and IT governance. On a high level, the design, development, and management of socio-technical systems has been and still is a unifying theme in our journal. But it is also clear that the different topics draw on different theories and technologies. Furthermore, they require different research methods. The reorganization of the BISE editorial board in 2013 along seven departments tried to address the increasing diversity of topics, theories, technologies, and methods used. When we look at the papers published in these departments, they cover a broad range of topics from engineering to scientific theories. This continuum can probably be best characterized as engineering science, as it was described by (Fung and Tong 2001):