-------- Original-Nachricht -------- Betreff: [isworld] CFP - JITCAR Special Issue on IT Collaboration in Organizations Datum: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:12:17 -0500 Von: Gordon, Steven gordon@babson.edu Antwort an: Gordon, Steven gordon@babson.edu An: AISWORLD Information Systems World Network isworld@lyris.isworld.org

Dear Colleagues:

On behalf of Guest Editor, Luca Iandoli of the University of Naples Federico II, I am pleased to announce the Call for Papers for a special issue of the Journal of Information Technology Case and Application Research on the subject of IT Collaboration in Organizations.

Within the last decade, mass-collaboration, enabled by Internet-based collaborative platforms (e.g. open standards development, forums, wiki, and social networks), has been acknowledged by many experts as one of the most relevant emerging novelties in the IT world, especially in terms of social impact. Thousands of anonymous users create and update daily the largest encyclopedia of the world (Wikipedia); distributed teams formed by thousands of open-source programmers collaborate to develop software products able to compete with large multinationals; millions of users exchange massive amounts of digital content through social networking platforms like Flickr and YouTube; hundreds of thousands of activists contributed to Barack Obama's electoral campaign playing a significant role in influencing the electoral outcome and now pursuing open-lobbying on the Presidential agenda through the Internet.

Such successful stories have motivated many companies and organization to explore the potential of collaborative platforms to enable easier, cheaper and more pervasive knowledge sharing and magnification than those supported by traditional IT tools. This exploration of collaborative platforms is motivated as well by increasing dissatisfaction with and consequent failure of centralized and highly structured KM platforms, such as corporate portals and traditional intranets as well as communication technologies, such as email and Instant Messaging.

There is anecdotal evidence arising from a number of noticeable case studies that collaborative platforms are more effective than traditional IT tools for knowledge sharing and creation. By empowering knowledge workers and exploiting patterns of knowledge socialization, they can create a uniquely accessible body of grass-root knowledge and effectively frame it, thanks to contributors' ability to index and tag contents and localize expertise on the basis of their collective salience and reputation. While considerable research has addressed on-line communities and, in particular, the open source movement and Wikipedia, to date we lack adequate theoretical explanations of mass-collaboration and enough empirical evidence to support the above claims in an organizational context. There are also some concerns that organizations and companies may lack some of the critical factors necessary for the successful emergence of collaborative on-line communities, such as scale, independence, voluntariness, self-motivation, and absence of centralized control and hierarchy.

In this JITCAR special issue, we are looking to explore the following research questions: can collaborative platforms increase organizations' performance and effectiveness? When do they constitute a viable alternative technology to traditional KM and communication tools in organizations and when may they fail? Which are the organizational and cultural requirements needed to successfully introduce mass-collaboration in organizations? We are interested in case and application research articles that focus on (but are not limited to):

* Organizational and contextual antecedents of e-collaboration: under which conditions, in which kind of organizations and for which tasks e-collaboration may thrive/fail; * Expected and actual Benefits deriving from e-collaboration in terms of knowledge sharing, creation and magnification; * E-collaboration and organizational design: incentives to attract and retain members, community governance, social networks, conflict and coordination management, new organizational models; * Collaborative platform start-up: variables influencing the choice, implementation and successful adoption of collaborative platforms; * Content management strategies: contents & members quality assessment (trust & reputation systems), information aggregation (belief aggregation, market-based aggregation), social tagging and collective information retrieval * Variables influencing design choice in collaborative platforms. * Collective knowledge exploitation (e.g. distributed decision making, collective prediction, group deliberation)

This special issue on IT collaboration in organizations is expected to be published in the fourth quarter 2009 edition of JITCAR. The timetable for submitting manuscripts for this special issue is as follows:

Submission deadline: June 15, 2009 Notification to authors: October 1st, 2009 Final Revisions due: November 20, 2009

Please contact the special issue editor Luca Iandoli, luca.iandoli@unina.it, with any questions. For general information about JITCAR scope and editorial policies please refer to the journal web page http://faculty.babson.edu/Gordon/jitcar/

Guest Editor Luca Iandoli Dept. of Business and Managerial Engineering, University of Naples Federico II Piazzale Tecchio 80, 80125 Naples (Italy) Tel: +39 081 7682935 E-mail: luca.iandoli@unina.it

Steve Gordon, Editor-in-Chief, JITCAR Professor of Info Tech Management, Babson College

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