CALL FOR PAPERS

Please consider contributing to the track “IT for Global Welfare &
Sustainability” and kindly forward this Call for Papers to others. In
addition to traditional researchers, scholars and doctoral students in
academe, this track seeks papers from practitioners and developers on
their experience of implementing and using various ITs for Global Welfare
and Sustainability.

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CALL FOR PAPERS – TRACK: IT for Global Welfare & Sustainability
http://www.ecis2012.eu/tracks/it-for-global-welfare-and-sustainability.html
The 20th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS’12)
Barcelona, SPAIN, June 11-13, 2012
Submission Deadline: December 1, 2011
For more information, visit: www.ecis2012.eu
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*The background and objectives of this track

Although it is well accepted that IT is a crucial component in today’s
business organizations to execute their strategy and in government and
NGOs to carry out their mission, its effectiveness in fostering global
welfare and sustainability is not well understood. For example, both the
academic literature and documented organizational experience show that the
usage of enterprise resource planning (ERP), a standard practice in large
organizations, offer important organizational payoffs that span from
quality information to better decision making to improved business
impacts, but there is dearth of research on the usage of ERP systems in
welfare facilitating organizations. By welfare facilitating organizations
we mean non-profit organizations, social enterprises, government and
public sector organizations in developing countries, emerging countries
and developed countries in the fields of healthcare, child and old care,
human rights, education, training, employment, food and water, green
technologies, to name a few. Because proprietary ERP systems (called P-ERP
here) are expensive in terms of license fees, implementation costs and
professional IT expertise and welfare facilitating organizations have
limited IT resources and budget, one reason for the slow diffusion of ERP
systems in welfare facilitating organizations is the high cost of these
systems.

In the ERP arena, Open Source ERP (OS-ERP), Cloud Open Source ERP (Cloud
OS-ERP) and Cloud Proprietary ERP (Cloud P-ERP) and other cloud software
are overcoming the barriers of high costs involved in proprietary IT
tools. Besides the cost advantage, open source products proffer faster
implementation, easier maintenance and upgrading, improved flexibility and
scalability. Further, it is easier for the user community to add mobility
to open source products, thereby enhancing the value of open source
systems in a distributed work place, a central attribute of welfare
facilitating organizations. Cloud Analytics, Cloud Business Intelligence,
Cloud ERP and Green ITs offer great opportunities to improve
sustainability in view of environmental quality, social equity and
economic viability of small, medium and large organizations.

The objective of this track is to facilitate a focused research dialogue
on the issues, challenges and best practices on the implementation and
usage of various ITs for Global Welfare and Sustainability. It seeks both
traditional academic research papers and experience-based case studies and
is open to research-in-progress summaries. All types of research, namely
conceptual, theoretical, empirical, analytical, case study-based, action
research, design science-oriented, and surveys are encouraged. Each
submitted paper will go through a double-blind review process.

*Suggested topics:

Sample topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Acquisitions policies, strategies and governance as well as innovative
usages of open source IT and cloud computing including OS-ERP, Cloud
OS-ERP and Cloud P-ERP in small, medium and large welfare facilitating
organizations.
• Strategic, organizational, governance, technical, social and cultural
challenges encountered in the acquisitions and innovative usages of open
source IT and cloud computing including OS-ERP, Cloud OS-ERP and Cloud
P-ERP as well as their remedies.
• Acceptance and diffusion of IT systems in welfare facilitating
organizations from motivational, productivity, performance, costs,
cultural and social viewpoints.
• Infrastructure and interoperability issues of IT systems in welfare
facilitating organizations.
• Knowledge engineering, learning and training issues of IT systems in
welfare facilitating organizations.
• Measurements, metrics and evaluation of IT systems in welfare
facilitating organizations.
• Success and failure cases of IT systems in welfare facilitating
organizations.
• Current directions and future trends of IT systems in welfare
facilitating organizations.
• IT for environmental risks management.
• IT for sustainability including ITs for sustainability reporting, ITs
for sustainable global supply chain management and Green IT.
• Effective usage of sustainability analytics in global enterprises.
• Innovative green ways of working, conducting meetings, forming teams and
organizations on a global scale using cloud computing, mobile technologies
and other IT tools.


*Track Co-chairs:

Dr. Nazmun Nahar, PhD (ISE), PhD (IS)
Department of Computer Science and Information Systems
University of Jyvaskyla
P.O. Box 35, FIN-40014 Jyvaskyla, FINLAND
E-mail: nazmun.n.nahar@jyu.fi

Professor Donald R. Chand
Department of Information and Process Management
Bentley University
Waltham, MA 02452, USA
E-mail: dchand@bentley.edu

Professor D.P. Goyal
Department of Information Management
Chairperson Computer Centre, INDIA
E-mail: dpgoyal@mdi.ac.in

Senior Researcher Najmul Huda
Department of Information Processing
Tallinn Technical University
Tallinn, ESTONIA
E-mail: najmul.n.huda@gmail.com


*Associate Editors:

Alina Chircu, Bentley University, USA
Dag Håkon Olsen, University of Agder, NORWAY
Eli Hustad, University of Agder, NORWAY
Kalinga Jagoda, Mount Royal University, CANADA
Marlon Dumas, Tartu University, ESTONIA
Nitya Karmakar, Curtin University, AUSTRALIA
Pasi Tyrvainen, University of Jyvaskyla, FINLAND
Rahul De, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, INDIA
Sarika Sharma, JSPM's Eniac Institute of Computer Applications, INDIA
Sergey Muravyov, Tomsk Polytechnic University, RUSSIA
Slinger Jansen, Utrecht University, THE NETHERLANDS
Sridhar Raghavan, Motorola, USA
Tarun Kabiraj, Indian Statistical Institute, INDIA
Vipin Tyagi, Jaypee University of Engineering & Technology, INDIA
Wing Lam, U21Global, SINGAPORE