Tuesday, January 5, 2010

ICIS 2009

The International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) was celebrating its 30th Anniversary, December 15-18, Phoenix.

Our research group was very active. Vinay Tiwari was participating in the ICIS doctoral consortium, Meditya Wasesa was presenting a poster at Web2009 (and won the best poster paper award), Ting Li was runner up in the best ICIS doctoral dissertation, Diederik van Liere was presenting his work at ICIS on open source, Wolf Ketter was presenting and chairing sessions at Web2009 and WITS, Peter van Baalen and I were presenting our work at the IFIP 9.2 workshop.

On Wednesday December 16 we hosted the CBS/HSE/RSM reception. The reception was a great success and very well received by our colleagues from around the world.

This year I helped as track co-chair - together with Bruce Weber (London Business School) and DJ Wu (Georgia Tech) - to handle the largest ICIS track: Information Systems and Economics. Thanks to our 34 associate editors we were able to select the best papers out of the 58 submissions.

Bruce, DJ and I also organized a panel discussion at ICIS: Are we WISE about sub-fields in IS?

We were very happy that our very distinguished colleagues Yannis Bakos, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eric Clemons, Rob Kauffman, Avi Seidmann, Sandra Slaughter, and Andy Whinston accepted our invitation and shared their views with the ICIS community.
The short presentations and discussions were excellent.

My take aways:

1. WISE as sub-field is strong and for the IS field important. It is linking the economics field with the IS field and is different from most of the other 25 pre-ICIS workshops.

2. The IS field needs to promote its high quality research to the outside world (other scientific disciplines and to the business world).

3. The new wave of very detailed personal data (from social network sites, smart card usage, RFID use, etc) will developed new theoretical insights about all kinds of decisions and will shape the IS field.

4. ICIS could be the umbrella organisation that will cover logistics, payment, hosting, etc for all the 25 workshops that will be hosted in one week.

WISE 2009

The Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE) was celebrating its 20th Anniversary, December 14-15, 2009 in Phoenix (Arizona).

On December 3, 1989 the first Workshop was held at MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chris Kemerer (at that time at MIT) and Yannis Bakos (at that time at UC Irvine) were the organizers of the first workshop. They felt there was a need for (and here I quote from the first Call for Papers)“ a workshop addressing the use of theory and research methods from Economics to address theoretical and applied questions in the Information Systems discipline”. And there was a need. In these twenty years WISE sustained. It attracted 32 attendees 20 years ago and this week there were 134 attendees. This year we had excellent presentations and the workshop itself was extremely well organized by Yannis Bakos, Eric Clemons, Rob Kauffman, and Lorin Hitt. Thank you!

You can download the workshop program and papers here.