KEY INFORMATION SYSTEMS ISSUES: AN ANALYSIS OF MIS PUBLICATIONS By: Prashant C. Palvia , Balaji Rajagopalan, Anil Kumar, and Ned Kumar Palvia, P.C., Rajagopalan, B., Kumar, A., and Kumar, N. "Key Information Systems Issues: An Analysis of MIS Publications." Information Processing and Management. Vol. 32, No. 3, 1996, pp. 345-355. Made available courtesy of Elsevier: http://www.elsevier.com/ ***Reprinted with permission. No further reproduction is authorized without written permission from Elsevier. This version of the document is not the version of record. Figures and/or pictures may be missing from this format of the document.*** Abstract: Reports of key MIS issues based on the perceptions of senior IS executives appear periodically in the MIS literature. In this article, we provide another perspective on key MIS issues by examining published MIS articles. A content analysis of MIS articles appearing between 1989 and mid-year 1993 in prominent academic and practitioner journals has been conducted in order to: identify, classify, and prioritize by meta-categories the key issues in MIS publications; to perform a trend analysis of the various meta-categories; and to examine the relevance of issues by providing a comparison with the issues that emerged out of previous key issue studies. Twenty-six key issues are ranked according to their frequency of occurrence as the topic of inquiry in the 630 articles surveyed. Further, a year-by-year analysis of publications from 1989 to 1992 provides some visible trends. The study also reveals differences that exist between the issues that appeared as important in MIS publications and those that appeared significant to the top executives in key issue studies. Reasons for and implications of these differences are offered. Article: INTRODUCTION The growth rate in many areas of business and specifically in information systems (IS 1 ) has reached a level which would, in 1985, have seemed more like a fantasy than a prophesy. Reports of innovations in hardware, software, applications, and IS management appear in journals and newspapers daily. As an example, one area rich in current research: executive information systems (EIS) is predicted to grow by 400% in the 1990s (Kolodziej, 1989). In order to keep pace, studies are continually performed to determine the changing IS needs of managers (Davenport & Buday, 1988; Moynihan, 1990: Rao et al. 1987). In the same vein, a series of studies (many of them published in the MIS Quarterly) have been conducted to identify key information system (IS) issues that are critical to MIS managers (Brancheau & Wetherbe, 1987; Dickson et al., 1984; Niederman et al., 1991). It can be argued that the evolving nature of management information systems (MIS) necessitates this periodic examination. Another potential source for identifying current key IS issues is published MIS articles in leading journals. Surely, the authors ought to be writing about issues of concern, and journal editors and reviewers providing the necessary filter so that the published articles represent key issues and concerns. In any case, this review of recent articles would provide an alternate view of key issues, worthy of examination in its own right. As such, the purpose of this study is to examine the published MIS research in leading MIS journals in order to: (1) identify, classify, and prioritize the key MIS issues by meta-categories, (2) to perform a trend analysis of the various meta-categories, and (3) examine the relevance of issues by providing a comparison with the issues that emerged out of the previous key issue studies.