Dr. James Gaskin, Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the BYU Marriott School of Business, was a member of one of three winning teams at the 2017 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) inaugural “paper-a-thon”. The conference, held in Seoul, South Korea in December 2017, featured information system professors, students, and professionals from around the world.
This year’s conference was the first to hold the paper-a-thon event. The session chair organized 20 teams according to the skills each team member brought. The teams were made up of current students and junior faculty, with four or five members per team.
Each team was given one hour to brainstorm ideas to see what their combined skills and assets could produce. They then drew some representation of this on their whiteboard. The mentors, who were selected prior to the conference by the session chair, were then able to roam between groups to see what the groups had come up with. The mentors then selected which group they wanted to support. Dr. Gaskin, who served as a group mentor, said that the selection process “was a bit like speed dating.”
After the mentors had chosen their groups, they brainstormed with their group for another hour. They filtered and refined their ideas until they came up with a story and study that was substantial enough to provide unique intellectual contributions to the field of information systems. The mentors gave their teams some final guidance and then let them loose. The teams worked overnight for the next 18 hours (in true hack-a-thon fashion) to analyze their data, refine their theories, and strengthen their contributions to the field as they developed their idea and prepared for a presentation to a panel of editors and senior scholars the next morning.
The remaining teams (a few dropped out) delivered their presentation and the judges then deliberated for about an hour to choose the groups with the greatest potential to succeed at producing a publishable study at a top journal within the next three months. Teams were assessed on the substantiality of their intellectual contribution, the rigor of their analysis, the richness of their theory, and the overall maturity and preparation of their study.
Dr. Gaskin’s team was one of three winners selected from the paper-a-thon. His group’s paper was about the “technical debt” accumulated when taking shortcuts during the software development process – a debt which is eventually due and must be paid. They used qualitative interview data from software developers and quality assurance testers at small- and medium-sized software companies across Europe.
The winning teams were given the opportunity to present their study on the final day of the conference. More importantly, they were awarded the opportunity to have their paper fast-tracked for the Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), which is one of the top research journals in the field of information systems. Dr. Gaskin’s team is currently collecting additional data around the world to bolster their original findings in preparation for submission to JAIS by the end of March.