The Diverse Landscape of IS Development

Track Chair/s

Keld Bødker Roskilde University Denmark
Lesley Land University of New South Wales Australia
Sabine Madsen Roskilde University Denmark
Sabine Matook University of Queensland Australia

Track Description

This track addresses the conference theme of "Location" through a focus on the landscape of Information Systems Development (ISD). This landscape has changed and broadened enormously over the last decades, both in practice and with regard to theory.

In practice ISD now takes place in many different types of organizational settings, and various organizational forms are used – such as collocated, distributed, virtual, open source/voluntary, outsourced and global setups. Moreover, many different types of methods, modeling and visualization techniques, automated tools, and standard components are applied and shape ISD as it is performed in practice. Also, the information systems that are being developed differ greatly in size, ranging from small apps to large-scale, life-critical systems, and they are being developed for increasingly heterogeneous group of users, in the roles of employees, consumers, and citizens. In other words, in practice, the landscape of ISD has become very diverse.

This is also the case with regard to the theoretical ideas that inform the field. Thus, "new" theoretical approaches that focus on institutional logics, social capital, improvisation, tinkering, emergence, adaptive systems, chaos, and complexity add to or replace "older" understandings that emphasize the soft systems, knowledge management, and socio-technical aspects of ISD.

We call for papers that focus on and facilitate our understanding of ISD as an increasingly diverse field, in both theory and practice. In particular, we encourage papers that explicitly use theory to understand, compare, support and/or improve practice.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

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