Making Research More Relevant While Not Diminishing Its Rigor

The issue of research rigor versus relevance has been bandied about in the halls of computing for several decades now. This issue is about trying to ensure that research is not only rigorous, a goal we all support but also relevant to practice, a goal that at least practitioners support wholeheartedly. To address this issue, Michael Rosemann and Iris Vessey recently published an interesting proposal ("Toward Improving the Relevance of Information Systems Research to Practice: The Role of Applicability Checks," MIS Quarterly, Mar. 2008, pp. 1-22). This paper focuses on their proposal because computing and software people seldom read the IS literature and thus are likely unaware of it. The proposal is astonishingly simple yet potentially powerful.