2.1 The nature of the IS discipline
Drawing on sociology of science foundations, Taylor, Dillon, and Van
Wingen (2010) posit that to survive and prosper, health applied
disciplines must meet the dual demands of academic and practitioner
audiences by demonstrating both focus and diversity in their research.
The nature of the IS discipline can be likened to that of medical field
in the context of convergent and management in divergency. Convergent in
the sense of gathering and collating facts and relationships among key
findings in relevant studies. Thus, the extent to which two measures of
variable that theoretically should be related are indeed related is a
consideration often used in sociology, psychology, and behavioural
sciences. The objective of this concept lies in the need for existing
relationship between/or among key findings from selected multiple
studies from practice and interventions to serve as evidence for
decision-making. In fact, IS and the continuous emergence of
Internet-based health information technologies and other decision
support systems provide evidence-based knowledge. It is the power of
being able to attribute causes to effects through accrued evidence. For
example, it would have been useful if there was sufficient evidence to
support providers to know when to appropriately order telemetry and
appropriately discontinue telemetry when it was no longer medically
indicated.
IS is a combination of social science, business, and computing science
and increasingly of health sciences. Divergent thinking capability has
become increasingly important for innovation and problem solving and in
a spontaneous, free-flowing manner, many ideas are generated in an
emergent cognitive fashion (Ni, Yang, Chen, Chen, & Li, 2014). The
discipline of IS, particularly IS, e.g., IS Strategy tends to be more
abstract and exploratory with flexibility to respond to the ongoing
rapidly changing needs of businesses. This can be achieved through the
exploration of emerging business trends with new evolving models for the
development, implementation, and use of systems in various application
domains: IS strategy and business outcomes; Internet applications,
computer-supported collaborative work, virtual teams, and knowledge
management (Taylor et al., 2010). The nexus between medical research and
management research is IS research. On this, the study by Tranfield et
al. (2003) provides the difference between medical research and
management research. This allows researchers in IS to operationalize
both convergent and divergent in the context of “Nature of the
discipline”. We demonstrate this by adapting these differences. Early
on we contended that the definition of IS was narrow due to its
exclusion of health sciences and given the increasing role of IS in
healthcare domain.