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.