Designing the Digital Future of Society and Business through Information Systems Engineering
Designing the Digital Future of Society and Business through Information Systems Engineering
Emerging digital technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), offer significant opportunities for shaping the future of businesses and society by addressing grand challenges like the deterioration of the natural environment, global health, poverty, or inequality. At the same time, digital technologies present a grand challenge in themselves, epitomized by pertinent questions the relationship between AI and human values. Consequently, designing information systems solutions for the future of business and society must account for both the unparalleled opportunities and the potential dangers associated with these digital technologies. But how can this be done? How can we leverage the full potential of digital technologies to solve business and societal problems?
Any approach to designing the digital future must take into account the organizational and institutional implications of digital technologies. Information systems engineering must reconsider the boundaries of the systems it designs and disrupts. Certainly, digital innovation and transformation will bring an influx of new technological opportunities, and seizing them presents a key design challenge. At the same time, organizations and governments must actively design the institutional context of digital transformation, including governance structures and policies that can guide these changes in socially beneficial ways without compromising innovation. Besides, information systems engineering must actively seek to imagine and push the boundaries of digital innovation and transformation and engage in future-thinking.
From a business standpoint, essential questions include: What are the future forms of organizing enabled by emerging digital technologies, and what design approaches support them? What are novel approaches to information systems engineering that businesses can take to simultaneously address societal, economic, and ecological challenges? How can information systems be designed to meet ethical and regulatory requirements in the face of socio-technical-ecological change? How can information systems be used to design effective and future-proof organizational governance structures? From the perspective of governments and society at large, key questions include: What are the social values that are impacted by emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence? How should digital technologies be regulated to not compromise innovation? How can digital technologies be used to design effective and future-proof regulatory systems? How can digital technologies empower bottom-up initiatives that allow citizens to contribute to political and societal development?
The aim of this conference theme track is to advance the discourse on emerging technologies and their role for designing the future of business and society and for addressing grand challenges. We invite rigorous and relevant studies employing a variety of methods. We seek empirical (quantitative with primary or secondary data, qualitative, computational discovery, multi-method) studies, theory development studies, as well as interventionist research seeking to develop and evaluate prescriptions for IS solutions to important business and societal problems.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Digital solutions for addressing grand challenges
- Designing IS for new forms of organizing
- Designing for digital inclusion
- Designing for digital sustainability
- Designing for digital resilience
- Twin transformation
- Societal impacts of emerging technologies
- Institutional implications of information systems engineering
- Regulatory design in the context of socio-technical change
- Ethical issues in digital technologies and their design
- Designing responsible AI and AI governance
- Data governance
- Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues in technology and organizations
- Futures-thinking
Track chairs
AEs
- Abdullah Albizri, Montclair State University, USA
- Kenan Degirmenci, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
- Jenny Elo, University of Jyväskylä, Finland Michael Gau, University of Liechtenstein, Liechtenstein
- Maike Greve, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
- Anne Ixmeier, LMU Munich. Germany
- Steve Kimbrough, University of Pennsylvania, USA
- Jeanine Kirchner-Krath, University of Nuremberg, Germany
- Marc-Fabian Körner, University of Bayreuth, Germany
- Julian Lehmann, Arizona State University, USA
- Xue Nancy Ning, University of Wisconsin, USA
- Roxana Ologeanu-Taddei, TBS Education, France
- Simon Trang, University of Paderborn, Germany
- Victoria Uren, Aston University, UK
- Markus Weinmann, University of Cologne, Germany
- Christof Weinhardt, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
- Pauline Weritz, University of Twente, The Netherlands