Paper title (Paper Title style) Australasian Journal of Information Systems Davern & Black 2024, Vol 28, Editorial Editorial 1 Editors’ Comments AJIS Thinking Differently in Service of The Community Michael Davern Faculty of Business and Economics The University of Melbourne Parkville, VIC Australia Email: mjdavern@unimelb.edu.au Stuart Black Faculty of Business and Economics The University of Melbourne Parkville, VIC Australia Email: stuart.black@unimelb.edu.au Lend me Your Ears and I’ll Sing You a Song (The Beatles, “With a little help from my friends”, 1967) 1 Introduction In deference to Karlheinz Kautz, our immediate predecessor as Editor-in-Chief, we thought that we would use a music reference to start our AJIS journey. We thank Karl for his work over the past few years to build AJIS to its current position, and we are glad to have Karl continue with AJIS: continuing his role as commissioning editor for the submissions initially received prior to the EiC transition, formally supporting us through his role as “Immediate Past EiC” on the AJIS Editorial Advisory Board (Clarke, 2024), and continuing to provide high quality ad-hoc advice. 2 With a little help from my friends AJIS is first and foremost a journal for the Australasian IS community. We have a mandate to strengthen, nurture and develop the community of scholars in the region, but we need the help of you, our community, to do so. We need your submissions; we need your willingness to be a reviewer or Senior Editor when requested. We are pleased to have an expanded editorial office with two Editors-in-Chief (Michael Davern & Stuart Black), a chief technology officer (John James) and a production editor (Jacqui Blake). We have a small but growing group of leading scholars and emerging leaders forming our troop of new Senior Editors (Angsana Techatassanasoontorn, Arif Perdana, Humza Naseer, Ida Someh, Petros Chamakiotis, and Wasana Bandara) who will maintain ongoing appointments with the journal rather than the previous approach of situational appointments. We thank scholars who have helped in the past in editorial roles (and continue to work through the current pipeline) and look forward to working with our new Senior Editors. As we build our SE team, we are purposefully seeking diversity in our SE appointments (in topic, method, geography, institution and gender). To better serve our community we are making some changes to AJIS processes and systems. With the support of AAIS, we are moving to have AJIS operate under the AAIS domain (aaisnet.org). We have instigated a rapid initial review process. When a paper passes the desk Australasian Journal of Information Systems Davern & Black 2024, Vol 28, Editorial Editorial 2 reject filter, the EiC’s, in consultation with the SEs when appropriate, provide a brief review to identify any major issues and return the paper to the authors to address and resubmit prior to assigning an SE and reviewers. Our goal, which we are currently meeting, is to have this rapid review back to the authors within 10 days. As a result, the papers received by SEs and reviewers are already of a higher quality. By reducing the workload for SEs and reviewers in this way, we can tighten expected turnaround times for SEs and reviewers and ultimately expedite papers faster through the review process. To maintain accountability to our community, we will regularly report on review process metrics via the journal website in due course. 3 Think Differently The research marketplace has changed dramatically since the inception of AJIS and so too has the role of AJIS evolved. Our mantra for the papers AJIS seeks to publish is that they must be ‘interesting but sufficiently rigorous’. A paper in AJIS should cause readers to think differently. It should provide insight to practice as well as the academy. It should be sufficiently rigorous to ensure the credibility of the findings. To this end, we encourage potential AJIS authors to reverse the typical thinking on the so- called ‘research-practice gap’ (Makin, 2021; Shapiro et al., 2007) and explore practitioner / policymaker / individual problems that would benefit from formal research and/or explore real-world phenomena that is not well supported by existing literature. We encourage researchers to strongly consider problematization research approach (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011), or alternatively to identify what the literature gets wrong (Kane, 2022, p. 1074). Topically and methodologically, we embrace the diversity that makes Information Systems such a fascinating discipline. We view the discipline as the intersection of three broad overlapping areas: a social agent (e.g., individuals, organisation), a domain context (e.g. application area or use-case setting) and an information technology artefact (software, hardware, data). While different papers may lean more in one direction than another, the research question and findings need to be relevant to the intersection. IS research isn’t simply solving a domain problem or exploring the behaviour of individuals or organisations or IT itself - rather it combines all three. In short, we expect papers to “try to sing in tune” with Information Systems as a discipline, not computer science or a business or social science discipline. AJIS will continue its policy of declining descriptive literature reviews and derivative adoption studies that lack new insight or challenge existing thinking. Gap-spotting style submissions with limited impact (Sandberg & Alvesson, 2011), regardless of how well executed will likely get desk rejected. Instead, we want to invest the journal’s editorial capacity to nurture articles that provide a high ‘return on reader’s time investment’. Editorial capacity will be deployed to encourage and develop scholars to thrive in the more engaged academy of the future. AJIS must be visible and relevant to all three stakeholder groups (the research community, practitioners and policymakers). As editors, we will seek to ensure that all accepted articles clearly articulate the implications of the research for both fellow researchers as well as practitioners / managers and policy-makers, as appropriate. In pursuing this “Think Differently” approach, we are prepared to take a greater risk with papers that have the potential to generate interest, insight, and broader impact beyond citation metrics and the like. We seek forward-looking and provocation-style submissions (Burton- Australasian Journal of Information Systems Davern & Black 2024, Vol 28, Editorial Editorial 3 Jones et al., 2021), and already have begun work on pumping the pipeline for such submissions from leading scholars within our community. We are also open for authors to reach out with proposals for ‘registered report’ style papers where topics are particularly risky or unique to the regional community. The existing track on ‘Research on Indigenous use of Information and Communication Technologies’ comes to mind here (see Gregor et al., 2023 as an example), at least with respect to the indigenous peoples of our region. We are also interested in surfacing and supporting submissions from the Australasian Association of Information Systems catchment outside of Australia and New Zealand. 4 It's your community - be part of it! While the above are our thoughts on our current plans, we stress that AJIS is a community asset, and we are only the stewards thereof. If you have thoughts or suggestions on what else the journal might do to provide benefits to the AAIS community, please get in touch via ajis.eic@aaisnet.org. We look forward to reading your interesting and thought-provoking submissions and engaging with you through the editorial process to grow AJIS as a real community asset. References Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating Research Questions through Problemitization. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 247–271. Burton-Jones, A., Butler, B. S., Scott, S. V., & Xin Xu, S. (2021). Examining Assumptions: Provocations on the Nature, Impact, and Implications of IS Theory. MIS Quarterly, 45(1), 453–498. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2021/15434.1 Clarke, R. (2024, May 20). AAIS Executive Vote of Thanks to the Outgoing AJIS Editor-in- Chief, Prof. Karlheinz Kautz. AAIS. https://aaisnet.org/news/aais-executive-vote-of- thanks-to-the-outgoing-ajis-editor-in-chief-prof-karlheinz-kautz/ Gregor, S., Gunawardena, M., Imran, A., Okai-Ugbaje, S., Page Jeffery, C., & Wilson, R. (2023). Indigenous Knowledge-Sharing Interventions in Australia and the Use of Information and Communication Technology: A Scoping Review. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 27. https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v27i0.4217 Kane, G. C. (2022). How to Write an A Paper. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 23(5), 1071–1077. https://doi.org/10.17705/1jais.00765 Makin, S. (2021). The research-practice gap as a pragmatic knowledge boundary. Information and Organization, 31(2), 100334. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2020.100334 Sandberg, J., & Alvesson, M. (2011). Ways of constructing research questions: Gap-spotting or problematization? Organization, 18(1), 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508410372151 Shapiro, D. L., Kirkman, B. L., & Courtney, H. G. (2007). Perceived Causes and Solutions of the Translation Problem in Management Research. Academy of Management Journal, 50(2), 249–266. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.24634433 Copyright Copyright © 2024 Michael Davern and Stuart Black. This is an open-access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 Australia License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and AJIS are credited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en Australasian Journal of Information Systems Davern & Black 2024, Vol 28, Editorial Editorial 4 doi: https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v28.5427 https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v28.5427