Volume 10  Issue6  Article 1 Journal of the Association for Information Systems IS Research Perspective Abstract Neil C. Ramiller School of Business Administration Portland State University neilr@sba.pdx.edu Brian T. Pentland Eli Broad College of Business Michigan State University pentland@bus.msu.edu In this essay, we take a fresh look at the IS academic community’s enduring concern with the management implications of its research. We examine in particular what we call the “variables-centered” research paradigm, which focuses its attention on co- variance among independent and dependent variables. As the predominant research tradition in the field, the variables-centered paradigm ought to constitute a major platform from which our community can speak to issues of managerial interest. Unfortunately, the variables-centered paradigm appears to distance researchers from the organizational actors, such as managers, to whom they would give advice and counsel. Particularly disturbing is the systematic erasure of those very actors from the domain of inquiry. Erased, too, are their actions and means of acting. Thus, when it comes time to offer useful prescriptions for action, our community attempts to do so on the basis of research in which, ironically, neither actors nor action directly appear. We offer some recommendations that may help to rectify this problem and, thereby, enrich the capacity of variables-centered research to speak in an informative and useful way to issues of practice. Keywords: management implications, information systems research, variables-centered research, narrative, process theory, pragmatic generality. Volume 10, Issue 6, pp. 474-494, June 2009 Management Implications in Information Systems Research: The Untold Story* * Rudy Hirschheim was the accepting senior editor. Gordon Davis, Allen Lee, and Dan Robey were the reviewers. This article was submitted on July 1, 2007 and went through two revisions.