Information Technology and Systems - I Systems Analysis and Design: Should We Be Researching What We Teach?

A guiding premise of academic scholarship is that knowledge gained from first-hand research experience is disseminated to students via the classroom. However, that valuable connection is lost when professors are not researching what they teach. In this paper, we explore issues of mismatch between teaching and research in the Information Systems (IS) discipline. Specifically, while systems analysis and design (SA&D) is an integral topic in IS curricula, this topic is the research specialty of few IS professors. This situation is reflected by the low number of research publications in this area; particularly in the leading mainstream IS journals. We characterize the gap between teaching and research in SA&D, offer possible explanations for this gap, suggest avenues to better understand and enhance SA&D research via the design science paradigm, list a number of areas in SA&D in which there is ample need and opportunity for high quality research, and show through an example how a research mindset can be incorporated in a graduate level SA&D course.