Eighteenth Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS)

Paris, FRANCE, December, 13-14, 2008. In addition to providing a platform for research interaction and discussion, WITS 2008 is also aiming to induce collaboration within the MIS community in assisting with development and exchange of teaching ideas for IS curriculum (see below)

WITS 2008 Call for Papers

The world economy has been rapidly transitioning into an era of the global workforce that is unparalleled in history. We are no longer constrained space -- global work distribution and virtual operations have become de facto standards of international business. Central to these advances is the idea of Global Services enabled by Information technology tying worldwide corporate workforce, customers and business partners. Such services are made possible by a combination of: 1) series of innovations in communication technologies, 2) process coordination mechanisms, 3) creative applications of computing and communication systems, and 4) novel business models employing these services. This has led to a major paradigm shift in many organizations from an almost singular focus on manufacturing to a global services orientation. As economies continually shift towards global networking, the need for integrative multidisciplinary research on service innovations has become critically important. We invite papers addressing the challenges and opportunities in a services-led global economy from a wide variety of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives: computing, communication, economics, management science, social and cognitive sciences. Since it is a workshop, WITS actively solicits papers describing novel research ideas that may be at a relatively early stage of development. [Click here for detailed call for papers.]


WITS 2008 Call for Submission - Technology Instruction in Business Curriculum Competition

Instructors teaching Information Technology (IT) in a business curriculum face significant challenges in organizing and developing instructional materials that effectively integrate technology concepts with business issues and problems. Often, instructional approaches tend to align themselves at extreme ends of the technology-business spectrum. At one extreme, the technological skills are given the main focus with limited emphasis on understanding the solution from the business contexts and requirements. At the other end, pedagogical materials are developed primarily with a business focus with little attention to understanding the key IT enablers and their potential to impact business solutions. Both approaches – lack of adequate and appropriate business contexts or the treatment of technology as a black box, lead to less than ideal learning outcomes for the business students.

The objective of the technology instruction competition is to bring together well-developed ideas, which can assist the MIS community at large, in their quest to improve the business orientation of their IT curricula. We solicit submissions of instructional modules that would demonstrate innovative integrations of technology and business in graduate or undergraduate courses. [Click here for detailed call.]

Deadline for abstract submission: ............... August 10, 2008
Deadline for paper submissions: ................. August 17, 2008
Notification of acceptance: .......................… September 26, 2008
Camera-ready copy due: .............................. October 17, 2008


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Co-chairs:

Ram Gopal (ram.gopal@business.uconn.edu)

R. Ramesh (rramesh@buffalo.edu)

Local arrangements chair:

Nicolas Prat (prat@essec.fr)

Prototype and Technology Instruction competition chair:

Kumar Mehta (kmehta1@gmu.edu)