Descriptions of Tracks

Big Data and Business Analytics Ecosystems

The purpose of this track is to shed some light on how big data and business analytics tools are reshaping contemporary companies. The focus is on how companies should optimally deploy and exploit big data as part of their competitive strategies, as well as how the analytic methods, tools, and techniques are best utilized for supporting business operations. In this respect the track will be revolved on themes such as how big data are effectively leveraged in a range of contexts and industries (e.g. technology, retail, oil and gas, healthcare, telecommunications), and what critical factors drive successful diffusion.

Papers that address topics on how information sources, technological infrastructure, human skills and knowledge, organizational/team structures, and management practices coalesce to achieve desired ends, are of increased interest. Furthermore, outcomes that demonstrate the organizational impact of big data and business analytics in terms of competitive performance, innovativeness, increased agility, and market capitalizing competence are encouraged. Emphasis will be placed on interdisciplinary papers that bridge the domains of organizational science, information systems strategic management, information science, marketing, and computer science. In addition, the track seeks to address the novel digital business strategies that emerge as part of these new technologies, and particularly the entrepreneurial wave and start-up business models that transpire due to these technological tools. Whereas much innovation is done within established organizations, a lot of the novel application of ICT is spearheaded by software start-ups. Start-up ecosystems are one of the most important economic drivers in today’s economy.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to big data and business analytics:

Application of big data to address societal challenges
Emerging concepts and methodologies on big data and analytics
Big data and management
Organizational learning and innovation from big data and business analytics
Data-driven competitive advantage
Human resource management in the data-driven enterprise
Big data digital business models
Proactive strategy formulation from big data analytics
Data and text mining for business analytics
Big data and the dynamics of social change
Behavioral and Recommender Systems Analytics
Big data and analytics to create business value
Social media analytics for business
E-learning analytics
Social media and learning analytics
Data quality improvement for business analytics
Big data and its impact on business strategy-formulation
Digital ecosystem big data

Track Co-Chairs

Ilias O. Pappas, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

Patrick Mikalef, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

Michail N. Giannakos, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

John Krogstie, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

George Lekakos, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece

Blockchain Applications: issues, challenges and opportunities

The blockchain provides an alternative way for maintaining records and documenting transactions in an open, secure and verifiable manner based on the consensus of a network of unknown peers. This technology constitutes the backbone of cryptocurrencies, such as the Bitcoin, and together with smart contracts, they have been attracting the interest of both practitioners and academics.
While cryptocurrencies themselves are often criticized due to permitting their use in questionable activities, such as fraud and money laundering, the blockchain and smart contracts promise to create – and have created already – a series of new application areas. Financial institutions, firms and governments started exploring how to successfully harvest the benefits of the blockchain. Central banks, for example, begun mapping the possible regulatory issues concerning the blockchain and the use of cryptocurrencies as an alternative payment mechanism, while the EU Commission has launched this year the EU Blockchain Observatory for monitoring the advances and the implications of this technology. All these highlight the importance of the technology and the expectations of practitioners and decision makers with regards to the blockchain.
For this track, we welcome theoretical perspectives and empirical studies on the application of the blockchain. We invite studies that address the nature of the blockchain, regardless of their method of inquiry; empirical (qualitative/quantitative/mixed) studies, conceptual papers and Research in Progress papers are all equally welcome. The theme of the track is purposefully broad and therefore submissions are welcome from all the different Information systems sub-disciplines (e.g., operations management, information systems management, business process engineering) as well as from disciplines that are closely relate to relevant issues (e.g., sociology, finance, philosophy, management, law).
Topics likely to be of interest include (but are not limited to):

Ethical Issues and Blockchain Applications
Privacy and Trust
Regulation issues
New markets and the role of market intermediaries
Legal Aspects and the blockchain
Innovation, social responsibility and new applications
Applications for the Internet of Things building on the blockchain
Big data and data processing
The role of the miner
Technologies, policies and standards
RegTech, InsurTech, FinTech powered by the blockchain
New governance approaches
Blockchain for the supply chain

Track Co-Chairs

Dr. Efpraxia D. Zamani, De Montfort University, UK

Dr. Ariana Polyviou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Prof. Gurpreet Dhillon, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Digital Markets

Digital Markets are now a major part of the global economy, creating value by applying information technology to transform the nature of traditional transactions. We have seen the rise of new business models, in B2B, B2C, and C2C markets, with the “sharing” and “on-demand” being just the most recent of a long string of business model innovations. The challenge for the IS community is to understand how these new business models shape our economy and our society. The Digital Markets track of MCIS considers various related issues, including two-sided platforms, social networks, the economics of information goods, as well as the impact of IT-driven business models. Papers should contribute to the theory or practice of creating, adopting or using information technology in the context of digital markets. Authors should aim for substance, and should be careful to highlight their unique contribution, which should be clearly contrasted to prior research.

Health Information Systems and Bioinformatics

The target of this track is to attract the most recent state of the art research in health information systems and bioinformatics. Health information systems is a topic that has received much attention during the previous years. With the advances in bioinformatics, health information systems are revolutionized to take into account data, tools and methods coming from the bioinformatics community.
The track will address information systems as tools both for IT experts as well as users (patients, clinicians, researchers).
Potential subjects include but are not limited to:

Health information management
Decision Support systems in healthcare
Health information flow modeling
Health data modeling and mining
Bioinformatics methods and tools
Biological information systems
Healthcare informatics
Healthcare analytics
Biomedical informatics
Health policy assessment tools
Technologies for health data integration
e-Health for prevention and rehabilitation
Security, privacy and trust for e-Health services/applications
Computing/storage cloud infrastructures for e-Health
Active Assisted Living
Social Networking, Computing and Education for Health
Internet of Things (IoT) applications for e-Health
Patient Monitoring Systems and Wearable devices
Mobile e-Health
Tools for patient empowerment and education

Track Co-Chairs

Themis Exarchos, Dept. of Informatics, Ionian University, Greece

Panagiotis Vlamos, Dept. of Informatics, Ionian University, Greece

Petros Spachos, School of Engineering, University of Guelph, Canada

Raffaele Conte, CNR – National Research Council of Italy – Institute of Clinical Physiology

ICT in Tourism

Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) have been instrumental in driving change in the tourism industry. However, ICT are not only instrumental in solving the information and communication functional needs of the tourism industry. Instead, technologies are also a transformational driver of the tourism industry structure and operations as well as the role and functions of its stakeholders. Technological advances are causing fundamental disruptions in tourism by empowering (traditional but also new) tourism actors to form new markets, offerings, management practices and competitive strategies.

This track aims to attract research investigating both the functionalistic and the transformational role of ICT on three major stakeholders of the tourism industry: tourism demand, tourism supply and tourism destinations. Theoretical, empirical, experimental, and case study research contributions are welcome. All contributions should clearly address the practical and theoretical implications of the research reported. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Cyber-psychology and consumer behavior in tourism
Innovative ICT applications in tourism
Smart tourism services and smart destinations
Big data applications and impacts in tourism
Social media applications and impacts in tourism
Human-computer interaction in tourism
ICT and tourism experiences
New ICT in tourism: robots, AI, VR, AR, blockchain
Platform, gig or sharing economy in tourism

Track Co-Chairs

Marianna Sigala, University of South Australia

Brigitte Stangl, University of Surrey

Juho Pesonen, University of Eastern Finland Business School

Improving Lives with Information Technology (track organized by the OCIS group of the Academy of Management)

IS researchers face many new digitalization challenges to explore, understand, explain and design: What do people expect from interactions with other people, data, and things? What are the contextual factors that drive their behavior? What are the technology affordances that influence and shape these use patterns? What is the impact of these interactions on individuals, organizations, and the society at large? How to design innovative solutions? Moreover, there are many theoretical and practical questions that emanate from the abundance of data that characterizes our contemporary life. They range from tackling socio-technical aspects associated with the volume, variety, velocity, and veracity of data to extracting information and knowledge resources that help organizations and institutions to innovate. This calls for IS researchers both to build revelatory theory about the novel organizational capabilities required to build successful entrepreneurial ecosystems, as well as to address new and existing design problems by creating useful, innovative and reusable solutions enabled by digital technologies.

Overall, the main focus of the track is:

To advance a better understanding of how people interact with exponentially growing data and increasingly autonomous things
To contribute to the development of innovative and disruptive use cases
To assess their advantages and disadvantages from individual and organizational perspectives
To contribute to a better understanding of respective design problems and innovative designs that address such problems.

We invite papers that utilize a diverse range of perspectives, and welcome controversial and well-argued papers that challenge established positions. We also encourage the use of novel research methods that take advantage of innovative approaches to exploit the potential of data analytics.

Track Co-Chairs

Abayomi Baiyere, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Information Systems for Green and Sustainable Society

Reducing green-house-gas (GhG) is one of the top priorities of EU and the world to tackle global warming. Organizations need to review and redesign their business processes to be more sustainable and consume less energy. Information systems are essential for saving the Earth from global warming but we need to have better understanding on how to design IS artifacts to overcome challenges in different sectors; how to use IS in an environment friendly way; and what impacts IS has for transforming organizations.
Green IS is a core subfield in the information systems (IS) discipline and dedicated to understand how IS can transform organizations and society into more sustainable entities (Seidel et al. 2017).
This track welcomes ICT related research addressing issues that surround the impact of ISs on sustainable society and the design of IS for sustainable organizations.
The track is open to all methodological approaches and perspectives. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

IS/IT for energy efficient data centres
IS for sustainable logistics and supply chain
Environmental impact of IS
Methodologies for Green IS
E-government systems for sustainable society
Adoption of Green IS in organizations
Cultural issues of Green IS
Energy efficient smart cities
IS for green factories
IS for circular economy

Seidel et al. (2017) The Sustainability Imperative in Information Systems Research. Communications of the AIS 40 (3), 40 – 52.

Track Co-Chairs

Habin Lee, Brunel University London

Hakan Hocaoğlu, Gebze Technical University

Moongil Yoon, Korea Aerospace University

Internet of Things Systems for Smart Living and Smart Business

Internet of Things (IoT) signals a society where humans, computers, things are connected and communicate at any time and place. IoT technologies (e.g. sensors, RFID, NFC) are deployed in ‘things’ of our everyday social and work life and collect and transmit their status data in information systems. IoT-enabled people, animals, products, assets, computing devices, machines etc. (things) are uniquely identifiable and they can send over the network information and knowledge about their properties (e.g. identity, status, location, origin, history, ownership) and their surrounding environment.
A new report forecasts that about 50 billion devices (things), ranging from smartphones and laptops to wearables, cars and trucks, will be connected to the Internet by 2020. Consequently, the huge information accessed and collected through the IoT devices paves the way for a huge variety of applications that enable ‘smart’ living and business. For example, a ‘smart’ hospital can track patients to improve diagnosis and treatment. Respectively, the huge volume and variety of data generated by the connected ‘things’ can fuel business performance improvements because their analysis can provide new business insights that can support rapid, more effective decision making. Overall, home automation, healthcare, recycling, product lifecycle management, supply chain management and environment monitoring are just a few of the IoT application areas.
This MCIS 2018 track aspires to advance the on-going research on the transformational effect of IoT on business and life. Consequently, topics include but are not limited to:

Design science models for IoT services (e.g. system architectures, design principles, middleware solutions, etc.)
Data analytics and Big data for IoT ecosystems
Data quality challenges of IoT
Ecological impact of IoT
IoT effect on business processes and performance
Digitalization of industry and economy based on IoT
IoT effect on human/ employee behavior
Cost vs. Benefit Evaluation of IoT applications
Implications of IoT for change in organizational life
IoT and users interactions
IoT-enabled Green organizations
Smart Cities
Privacy and security for IoT services
IoT Applications and Services: home automation, healthcare, etc

Track Co-Chairs

Cleopatra Bardaki, PhD, Athens University of Economics and Business, Department Of Management Science and Technology

Massimo Bertolini, University of Parma, Department of Engineering and Architecture

Giovanni Romagnoli, University of Parma, Department of Engineering and Architecture

IS Education in a Digital Business Process Transformation Perspective

Universities are challenged by the rapid digital transformation of their core business processes.
Both academic and technological progress in the last decades has shaped the curriculum and methods of IS teaching at all levels of higher education. As the rise of the digital and connected society continues and innovations are created more rapidly, IS educators in the academic arena are constantly at risk of falling short of current developments in technological practice and/or means of education.
IS education has seen significant pedagogical changes. For example, case-based teaching, class debates, and experiential learning have broadened the range of pedagogical alternatives available to IS educators. MOOCs and flipped classrooms are likely to further disrupt existing practices by offering IS educators new pedagogical arrangements.
This is why it is crucial that the academic community continuously discusses new teaching methods, the content of IS classes, as well as novel ways of engaging students aside from the traditional classroom setting.

We welcome high quality research papers on any topic of IS curriculum and education. We are open to studies employing all research methods (conceptual or empirical, quantitative or qualitative). Topics of interest include (but are not limited to)

Content innovations, including
- Data Analytics and Predictive Modeling
- Work integrated learning and live industry projects
- Teaching Cases
Curriculum innovations, including
- Design and model curricula
- Work integrated learning
Innovative pedagogy, including
- Blended and hybrid learning
- Social networking and learning
- Peer and collaborative learning
- Use of online delivery methods and MOOCs
- Learning management systems and technology mediated learning
- Technology-enabled active learning
Innovative Assessment and evaluation including
- Program assessment and accreditation issues
- Assurance of learning
PhD education and research management
Emerging technologies and IS education

Track Co-Chairs

Bjarne Rerup Schlichter, Department of Management, Aarhus University, Denmark

Nikolaus Obwegeser, Department of Management, Aarhus University, Denmark

Pantelis M. Papadopoulos, Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media, Aarhus University, Denmark

New Directions for Digital Governance: Towards Government 3.0

Quite interesting in the last years has been the evolution and advance of the digital governance domain. Its first generation, referred to as ‘Government 1.0’ focused on the exploitation of ICT for improving internal efficiency and for providing services to citizens and firms through various electronic channels (e.g. Internet or mobile). Latter a second generation of digital governance emerged, referred to as ‘Government 2.0’, which focused on the use of Internet and social media for promoting transparency, citizens’ participation, and collaboration. In the last years on one hand there are significant evolutions in Government 1.0 and 2.0 towards higher levels of maturity, efficiency and effectiveness, while on the other hand a new generation of digital governance applications are emerging, referred to as ‘Government 3.0’. Its main characteristics are:

the smart utilization in government of some new disruptive ICTs that have recently emerged, such as big data, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, intelligent bots and agents, business analytics, data mining, distributed ledger technologies and blockchain, gamification, and computer-based societal simulation;
the use of ICT in government beyond efficiency improvement, for supporting evidence-based decision and policy making, in order to address the complex and serious challenges and problems of modern societies, leveraging both the ‘traditional’ ICT and the above disruptive ICTs, especially through the exploitation of big data, advanced modelling, data analytics and societal simulation;
the mobilization and combination of both ‘internal’ public sector resources (skills, information, knowledge, creativity, assets) as well as ‘external’ societal resources (through engagement of a wide range of stakeholders, extended crowdsourcing, public value ‘co-creation’ processes and practices) towards the design and implementation of effective public policies for the above challenges and problems, and the provision of valuable public services.
This Track aims to attract high quality research papers (qualitative research, quantitative research, case studies, design approaches, best practices, literature reviews, etc.) concerning both evolutions and advances of Government 1.0 and 2.0, and also the development and evolution of Government 3.0. In particular, the main topics of this Track include, but are not limited to:

Advances and evolution in Government 1.0 and 2.0 leading to higher levels of maturity, efficiency and effectiveness
Exploitation of disruptive ICTs in government (such as big data, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, intelligent bots and agents, analytics, data mining, distributed ledger technologies and block-chain, gamification, simulation, etc);
Policy informatics: multi-disciplinary policy modelling, simulation and analytics approaches for policy impact assessment and support of evidence-based decision making and public policy formulation;
Advanced crowd-sourcing/citizen-sourcing and public value co-creation methods and practices, aiming at the mobilization and exploitation of societal resources from a wide range of stakeholders, for the design and implementation of effective public policies and the provision of valuable public services, and also new roles of government ‘as a platform’;
New epistemological approaches and theoretical foundations for the development of Government 3.0 (ontological resources, definitions, neighbouring scientific domains, taxonomies, research topics, future roadmaps and foresights);
Challenges that the development of Government 3.0 poses: new government agencies skills and capacities required, as well as cultural changes, resistances to change, barriers, critical success factors, and also negative aspects and risks of Government 3.0

Track Co-Chairs

Charalampos Alexopoulos, University of the Aegean, Greece

Yannis Charalabidis, University of the Aegean, Greece

Euripidis Loukis, University of the Aegean, Greece

Security and Privacy

Organizations depend on information systems for their functions and need to manage risks related to information security, build secure channels for information sharing and maintain a healthy status as information processors. Thus information security is a high priority concern for organizations and government, demanding important investments on information which are often hard to justify. At the same time the new (technological) environment is characterized by an increasing concentration of information in the hands of a few entities, both public and private. This bulk of information may potentially be used for extensive and pervasive social surveillance, while powerful analytics make it possible to identify patterns in the behaviours of groups, which are designed by data gatherers by selecting specific clusters of information. The nature of these groups requires a different approach that cannot be exclusively based on individual rights, but entails the recognition of a collective dimension of privacy and data, in order to tackle the potential risks of group discrimination and surveillance.
This track is a forum for information security and privacy researchers. We welcome papers with a diverse range of topics that tackle security and privacy problems, using different theoretical lenses and methodologies. We seek to challenge the current status of information security and privacy across organizations and society in topics related but not limited to: Access control and authentication

Applied cryptography
IoT security
Cyber-physical systems security
Audit and risk analysis
Privacy and ethical use of analytics
Business models with security requirements
Cloud and Fog security
Critical infrastructure protection
Data protection and data protection technologies
Data and applications security
Digital forensics
Economics of Information Systems Security
Ethical issues in security
Human aspects of security
Identity and Trust Management
Information security education and awareness
Information security management
Mobile security
Network & distributed systems security
Pervasive systems security
Privacy in the workplace
Reliability and security of content and data
Reputation and identity management
Privacy by design and/ or value sensitive IS design
Privacy protection in social networks
Right to be forgotten and impacts on ICT design
Secure Business architectures and infrastructures
Secure Electronic payments
Security Behaviour and compliance
Security in social media and social networking
Security Policies
Trust management
Usability issues

Track Co-Chairs

Maria Karyda, University of the Aegean, Greece

Aggeliki Tsohou, Ionian University, Greece

Javier Lopez, University of Malaga, Spain

General Track

Submissions that do not fit in one of the themes above may be submitted in the general track of the conference, that will be managed by the program chairs.

Track Co-Chairs

Panos Kourouthanassis, Ionian University, Greece

Panos Markopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

João Vieira da Cunha, IÉSEG School of Management, France