The objective of this article is to explain the dominance and advocacy of the design- oriented research approach in Wirtschaftsinformatik (Business Informatics or BI), one of the major Information Systems (IS) communities. To this end, we employed a research approach based on autobiographical material. Sixteen well-known BI scholars served as informants, and provided career autobiographies in which they document their perceptions and observations regarding the genesis and development of BI. The average age of this sample of contemporary witnesses is 70 years, signifying a rich body of experience. Based on an interpretive analysis of the data, we find that the design of IS is deeply rooted in BI's history, and our results also show that there have always been close relationships with practice. As a consequence, we conclude that the success of BI as an academic community is inseparably associated with systems design, implementation, and engineering. Against this background, we argue that it is unlikely that BI will weaken its design orientation in the future, although external forces signify a shift to a more behaviouristic research approach. In order to balance the internal strength of the community and the external forces, we suggest a ‘theory-driven design approach’ as a viable strategy for the future orientation of the community.
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