Do they read your research? An investigation of practitioners’ use of IT outsourcing and cloud sourcing research

Do they read your research? An investigation of
practitioners’ use of IT outsourcing and cloud sourcing
research

Significant concerns have been raised in the Information Systems (IS) field about a research-practice
gap and the limited impact of IS research on the practice world. Theory-practice inconsistencies in the
field of IT outsourcing (ITO) prompted the investigation of the use of academic-generated knowledge
by ITO practitioners. We conducted interviews and a survey and found academic research is the least
used source of decision-making knowledge among ITO practitioners. Practitioners preferred to seek
advice from their peers, IT vendors and consultants. We identified two communities of users and nonusers
of academic research in our sample of ITO practitioners, with non-users forming the majority. We
found six factors that may influence the use of academic research by practitioners. Non-users of
academic research held perceptions that academic research was not timely, required too much time to
read, was far from the real world and that it was not a commonly used knowledge source for
practitioners. In addition, they read academic research less frequently and did not perceive themselves
as an audience for academic research.

Copyright: © 2016 Rajaeian et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Australia License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and ACIS are credited.