Track Chairs

Manuel Trenz, Assistant Professor, University of Augsburg, Germany. Email: manuel.trenz@wiwi.uni-augsburg.de

Christian Matt, Assistant Professor, University of Bern, Switzerland. Email: christian.matt@iwi.unibe.ch

Juliana Sutanto, Professor, Lancaster University, UK. Email: j.sutanto@lancaster.ac.uk

 

Track Description

Personal ICT: Design, Use and Impacts

The rapid diffusion of powerful technology has infused our lives with a plenitude of devices and services. With more mobile devices than people on earth and a growing number of products and services entering individuals’ private sphere, this area of digitization calls for further attention. Such personal ICT serve various purposes and range from devices such as smartphones, smartwatches, smart home and health trackers; services such as instant messengers and advanced personal assistants; to complex peer-to-peer ecosystems such as social networks, sharing services, and collaborative systems.

Accordingly, this track focuses on the design, use and impacts of these devices, services and complex product-service systems that are preliminary aimed at individuals in their different and varying roles as consumers, family members, friends, and citizens. This track aims at conflating perspectives on (1) the unique aspects of designing and building such ICT,(2) their impacts on individuals, organizations, and society, as well as (3) the challenges in managing them. For the benefit of individuals, firms, and society, this track seeks to gather insights that can be used to actively shape – i.e. understand, facilitate, and if necessary limit - the role of these novel technologies in individuals’ everyday lives.

The topics surrounding personal ICT have recently gained traction with more and more publications in our premier outlets focusing on personal rather than organisational information technology and multiple special issues (e.g., Information Systems Journal, Electronic Markets) calling for more research in this topic area.

The track aligns well with the ECIS 2019 conference theme “Information Systems for a Sharing Society” since the digitization of individuals’ personal spheres provides them with new capabilities and opportunities to control their own lives and their data, and to transform their interactions with other individuals, organisations, and governments. At the same time, those developments create new challenges and issues that we need to understand and mitigate.

We encourage both full paper and research-in-progress paper submissions on the topic from all theoretical and methodological perspectives.

Topics include but are not limited to:

  • Management and use of personal ICT

    • Interaction patterns with personal ICT

    • Discontinuance of personal ICT

    • Interdependencies between different devices and services in individuals’ ICT portfolios

  • Impact of personal ICT

    • Positive direct impacts (e.g., convenience, happiness, health improvements, …)

    • Negative direct impacts (e.g., exhaustion, physical well-being, …)

    • Indirect impacts on third parties (e.g., family, peers, society, organizations)

    • Rebound effects (e.g., reduced creativity)

  • Design of personal ICT

    • Approaches to develop ICT and related services tied to the needs of individuals

    • Design characteristics for personal ICT

 

Publishing Opportunities in Leading Journals

High quality and relevant papers from this track will be selected for fast-tracked development towards Internet Research (www.emeraldinsight.com/loi/intr). Selected papers will need to expand in content and length in line with the requirements for standard research articles published in the journal. Although the track co-chairs are committed to guiding the selected papers towards final publication, further reviews may be needed before the final publication decision can be made.

Internet Research (IntR) is an international and refereed journal that is indexed and abstracted in major databases (e.g., SSCI, SCI, ABI/INFORM Global), with the impact factor 3.017 in 2015.

 

Track Associate Editors

1. Lubna Alam, Associate Professor, Deakin Business School, Australia

2. Raquel Benbunan-Fich, Associate Professor, Baruch College, City University of New York, USA

3. Arne Buchwald, Assistant Professor, EBS University, Germany

4. Pnina Fichman, Professor, Indiana University Bloomington, USA

5. Qiqi Jiang, Assistant Professor, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

6. Antonia Köster, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Potsdam, Germany

7. Jörg Leukel, Assistant Professor, University of Hohenheim, Germany

8. Brad McKenna, Lecturer, University of East Anglia, UK

9. Carol Ou, Associate Professor, Tilburg University, Netherlands

10. Christoph Peters, Assistant Professor, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

11. Jella Pfeiffer, Assistant Professor, KIT, Germany

12. Wael Soliman, Assistant Professor, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

13. Verena Tiefenbeck, Assistant Professor, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

14. Ofir Turel, Professor, California State University, Fullerton, USA