The Nineteenth Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS'09) will be held in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, on 14-15 December 2009, just prior to the International Conference on Information Systems. The purpose of the workshop is to provide a forum for discussion and interaction among scholars with research interests in the cutting edge issues of information technology and systems. The theme of the conference will be "Interdisciplinary Frontiers in Information Technology Innovation."

Information technology is practically transforming every industry, be it health care, finance, tourism, retail, entertainment, or education. While every industry is very different, each has been transformed by innovation in IT with respect to the nature of products/services offered, consumer expectations, and the structure of the industry itself. For example, Hillestad et al. suggest that health information technology, e.g., electronic health record, could produce efficiency and safety savings of $140 billion in US physicians and $371 billion in US hospitals over the next fifteen years. U.S. banks are projected to spend an estimated $48 billion on IT in 2007 with that spending on the rise. More than one-half of airline reservations are made through the Web, and online sales reached $30 billion during the 2005 holiday season, up 30% from 2004. In entertainment and education, where consumers consume “information goods,” new players such as Apple’s iTunes – launched less than five years ago – surpassed Wal-Mart (on April 3, 2008) to become the largest music retailer in the world. The information systems innovations across interdisciplinary frontiers—both research and practice—needs to address several challenges, for example, lack of interoperability, privacy/confidentiality, human-computer interface, that are specific to that industry. We invite papers addressing the challenges and opportunities in IT across the six industries from a wide variety of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives: computing, communication, economics, management science, and social and cognitive sciences.

We solicit condensed research papers addressing issues concerning the theory, design, development, evaluation, and application of advanced information and communication technologies and systems. Of particular interest are papers that leverage inter-disciplinary research methods to address these issues. Since it is a workshop, WITS actively solicits papers describing novel research ideas that may be at a relatively early stage of development. For a list of topics of interest and submission instructions; see Call for Papers (PDF).

We also solicit research prototype and industry best-of-breed demonstrations at the workshop. In addition, we solicit innovative technology instruction in business curriculum demonstrations; see Call for Submissions (PDF).

For additional information about WITS'09, please contact:

WITS'09 CO-CHAIRS:
Vijay Khatri (vkhatriindiana.edu), Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
Huimin Zhao (hzhaouwm.edu), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS CHAIR:
Valentin Dinu (valentin.dinuasu.edu), Arizona State University, Tempe, USA

PROTOTYPE AND TECHNOLOGY INSTRUCTIONAL TOOLS CHAIR:
Faiz Currim (faiz-currimuiowa.edu), University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA

PROGRAM LIAISONS:
Europe: Matti Rossi (mrossihkkk.fi), Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland
Asia: Amitava Bagchi (bagchiiimcal.ac.in), IISER Calcutta, India, Guoqing Chen (chengqsem.tsinghua.edu.cn) Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, Lihua Huang (lhhuangfudan.edu.cn) Fudan University, Shanghai, China), and Kar Yan Tam (kytamust.hk) HKUST, Hong Kong
Latin America: Paulo Goes (pgoeseller.arizona.edu), University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
Australia: Andrew Burton-Jones (Andrew.Burton-Jonessauder.ubc.ca) , University of British Columbia, Canada

IMPORTANT DATES:
Deadline for abstract submission: August 11, 2009
Deadline for paper submission: August 18, 2009
Notification of acceptance of papers: September 29, 2009
Deadline for prototype demo, industry best-of-breed and innovative technology instruction: October 9, 2009
Notification of acceptance of prototype demo, industry best-of-breed and innovative technology instruction: October 16, 2009
Camera-ready copy due: October 27, 2009