Dear Colleagues,

 

we would like to invite paper submissions to the AMCIS 2012 - 18th Americas Conference on Information Systems, Seattle, Washington, August 9-12, 2012 (http://amcis2012.aisnet.org/).

 

Track: Global, International, and Cultural Issues in IS (SIGCCRIS)

Mini-Track: IT/IS Governance in Global Networks of Autonomous Operating Organizations

 

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DESCRIPTION

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Although IT/IS governance is a well established subject to all large scale companies, there has as yet been little research directed toward how IT/IS governance is managed within global networks of autonomous operating organizations (GNOs). Due to an increased globalized delivery and demand of (sub) services/products and at the same time the focus on core competencies, enterprises typically act in evolving networks of operational and managerial independent organizations. GNOs are broadly defined as “unbounded or bounded clusters of organizations that, by definition, are nonhierarchical collectives of legally separate units” (Alter and Hage 1993, Organizations working together) in order to comprise different forms of collaboration, ranging from loosely coupled, short-term virtual enterprises to long-term strategic alliances based on formal contractual relationships. Examples are project networks, logistics chains, partners in supply chain, private-public partnerships or airline alliances. Thereby, each kind of network (as well as their member organizations) shares the same characteristics, in that they are in general critically dependent on mutually accepted (often cross-national) policies, processes and cultures as well as on shared and evolving IT-services regarding infrastructures, distributed systems, fragmented data, communications standards etc. At the same time they have to adapt and change quickly, confronted with IT/IS governance and standardization challenges on an increasingly large scale – accompanied by an urgent need for IT-cost- reduction and transparency of ITs’ business value in general.

In particular, it is little understood how in GNOs IT/IS governance tasks and values are to be managed and distributed in a step-by-step, partly national-specific and partly international manner. This means, we are interested in how management tasks (esp. strategy development and large scale project governance, risk management, standardization management, enterprise architecture management, sourcing management and implementation of control frameworks including legal and compliance aspects) are organized within the network as a whole and how they are to be extended within each member organization in order to comprise network related topics. Furthermore, supporting extended management tasks requires both, appropriate and aligned structures/processes and new methods, tools, and IS technology. For capturing different perspectives innovative means of communication beyond established methods are needed that enable a vertical (up and down the hierarchy) as well as a horizontal (across national boundaries, among partners as well as external organizations) cascading of information at different levels of granularity and of national-dependent variety. In addition, as GNOs face emergent and evolving behavior in highly volatile markets (like changing partners, informal communication, micro- and macropolitics, self-organization, conflicts of interest and possibly biased factors (e.g. culture, environment, and domain)) research has to address (IT/IS) concepts and approaches revealing and illustrating emergent behavior. Moreover, the impacts of world-wide standardization challenges need to be examined with regard to flexibility, autonomy or long-term ROI. Finally, also related aspects of theories such as actor-network theory that offer a theoretical bridge between IT/IS governance and other scientific disciplines (e.g. software engineering or social sciences) are highly recommended.

In order to gain rich insight into and provide comprehensive means for the outlined subject we seek to bring together researchers from different fields such as business information systems, computer science, software engineering, CSCW, information visualization, management research, organization theory etc. Both conceptual and empirical works are welcome and will be considered for this mini-track.

 

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POSSIBLE TOPICS

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·         Theories, models, approaches and concepts of IT/IS Governance in global networks of autonomous operating organizations

·         Cooperation, coordination and communication relating to IT/IS Governance in global networks

·         Emergent and evolving behavior in the global networks of autonomous operating organizations

·         Case studies on degrees of IT/IS Governance, very large scale project management, management of corporate IT/IS governance tasks in GNOs or on systems of systems

·         Extensions to EAM in order to comprise national borders, to compare sites, national-dependent business-processes, and large scale IT-landscapes or to capture business partners

·         Alignment of management structures/processes and reporting levels in very large scale projects

·         Communicative visualization approaches comprising complex management structures, distribution of responsibilities in very large projects, reporting/modeling on different levels of granularity

·         Evaluations of advantage/disadvantage of world-wide standardization and centralization efforts

·         (Contingency) Factors influencing IT/IS governance structures and processes in GNOs, comparison of multi-national corporate governance, enterprise governance and IT governance

·         Cultural issues in IT/IS Governance and GNOs

·         Research methods and theories suitable for guiding research on IT/IS Governance in GNOs

 

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IMPORTANT DATES

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Deadline for paper submissions: March 1, 2012

Notification of Acceptance: April 6, 2012

Camera-Ready copy due: April 25, 2012

 

SUBMISSION SITE

http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/amcis2012

 

Email details of Mini-Track Chairs:

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Ingrid Schirmer – schirmer@informatik.uni-hamburg.de (University of Hamburg, Germany)

Matthias Goeken - m.goeken@fs.de (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, Germany)

Marcel Morisse – morisse@informatik.uni-hamburg.de (University of Hamburg, Germany)

 

Best regards

Marcel Morisse