Welcome to ICSOB2021 – This year theme: Software Sustainability!

Please note: The submission deadline has been extended to 8th September (AoE) and you can still make a new submission to the conference.

The 12th ICSOB conference will be organized by School of Business, University of South-Eastern Norway. This year we are fully online conference.

Although the business of software shares common features with other international knowledge-intensive businesses, it carries many inherently unique features. It is making it a challenging domain for research. The examples of many successful companies show that software provides a unique benefit to its users. Moreover, software has spread all over the world and has permeated in many industries, which are not usual for software. In particular, software companies have to depend on one another to deliver a unique value proposition to their customers or a unique experience to their users. Companies that were engineering-driven become software intensive and struggle to keep up with the required speed of development and planning.

ICSOB 2021 intends to attract researchers and practitioners who are concerned with software business in different ways. You are invited to submit papers addressing contemporary issues emerging at the intersection of the software and business domains, broadly defined. Both papers reporting research results and industrial experiences are welcome.

The special theme of ICSOB2021 is Software Sustainability. Sustainability is derived from the concept of sustainable development as “a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present needs”. There is an urgent need for sustainability management in many domains and areas, including software business. Research about software sustainability addresses sustainability concerns regarding aspects such as software product, software development process, strategy and policy, people, partnership, ecosystem, and business model.

We welcome both research and industry papers to the conference. The papers should be original and not submitted to or accepted by any other conference or journal. We are looking for short position and practice papers (maximum 6 pages) that provide insights on the life cycle management of software products and industry case studies as well as full research papers (maximum 15 pages) describing novel approaches to software business for software products and services.

The topics that ICSOB welcomes (but not limited to) are listed below:

• Software Sustainability – sustainability of software products, sustainable software development, sustainable software business model, sustainable management in software development and operation
• Software Ecosystems and App Stores – aspects related to software ecosystems health, ecosystem orchestration and governance, app economy, actors and supply network analysis, incentives and ecosystem-based business models
• Software Business Development – aspects related to developing business models and business modeling for software products and services, effective business model change, and improvement, economics of software companies, mergers and acquisitions, internationalization, outsourcing and other strategies for realizing these business models.
• Licensing, intellectual property and patents aspects and other legal aspects associated with software business – privacy and security is also welcome here
• Software startups – aspects related to environment success factors for software business and startups, entrepreneurial process in software development, software startup processes, disruptive innovation and adoption of startups, competence, risk management and managing startup growth
• Engineering and Management – aspects related to software product management, life-cycle perspective, continuous delivery, agile development, technical debt, platform governance, digital platforms, matchmakers, and value co-creation
• Human value, morale, ethics and believes – human-centered design, ethical software engineering, AI ethics, transparency, etc.
• Other aspects – games and gamification, software business education, disruptive trends in software business and the future of software business

A selection of best papers will be invited to submit extended versions for tentative publication in a Special Section of Information and Software Technology published by Elsevier https://www.journals.elsevier.com/information-and-software-technology

You are very welcome to submit your papers to one of these tracks via the EasyChair submission system : https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icsob2021

Papers should be submitted in PDF format. The results described must be unpublished and must not be under review elsewhere.

Submission Formats. Submissions must conform to Springer’s LNCS format and should not exceed 16 pages, including all text, figures, references, and appendices. Submissions not conforming to the LNCS format, exceeding 16 pages (for full papers) or 8 pages (for short papers), or being obviously out of the scope of the conference, will be rejected without review.

Each paper will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. Accepted papers will be presented at ICSOB ’21 and published in the conference proceedings, which is published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).
More info: icsob.org and in Twitter @ICSOBconf