Organizational Systems and Technology Track

This minitrack provides a venue for design science researchers (DSR) to share their work and interact with like-minded scholars. DSR is a prominent form of engaged scholarship, which combines inquiry with a potential for action and intervention. DSR may be viewed as having four related subfields, from which we welcome submissions:

• Science of design that focuses on creating ‘new-to-the-world’ socio-technical artifacts. We provide an outlet for researchers doing novel artifact-driven research in information systems (IS) and other fields such as entrepreneurship, operations management, pedagogics, or service research.
• Design theory studies that focus on the development of theories, design patterns, and design principles concerned with creating new or improved systems based on the kernel or grand theories
• Designed artifact research focusing on discovering revolutionary outcomes from design science research, i.e., ground-breaking solutions and their applications. Examples include the results of designing and deploying novel data representations, computational algorithms, business intelligence, data analytics, optimization techniques, design of markets, machine learning, and generative AI.
• Design research that focuses on how designers conduct design activities, e.g., the science of design research. Papers in this subfield could potentially come from IS and architecture and design studies.

All four subfields are often (but not always) tightly engaged with design practice. Accordingly, they frequently embody participative forms of research that rest on the advice and perspectives of multiple stakeholders in understanding a complex social problem.

The minitrack welcomes submissions from the entire range of alternatives that integrate inquiry with the potential of creating and shaping alternative futures. New tools, such as generative AI and specific tools like GitHub co-pilot, allow for easier exploration and modification of alternative designs, or even enable artifacts to design themselves. Such work extends the boundaries of human and organizational capabilities by theorizing and/or creating new and innovative artifacts. The building and application of these designed artifacts produce knowledge and understanding of a problem domain and its solutions, potentially transferable to other domains. This offers exciting avenues to develop a new genre of DSR, namely Generative DSR.

Accordingly, this minitrack’s scope includes research contributions from all four DSR subfields described above. These include computational and engaged approaches, studies of the practical use of DSR approaches, the use of such approaches to expand theory, and conceptual foundations that significantly and cogently broaden our understanding of the epistemology and methodology of such approaches and their philosophical underpinnings. These include:

• Developing design artifacts and design theories
• Evaluating and testing design artifacts and design theories
• Different approaches to the design of artifacts and design theorizing
• Design as a creative act in development for systems etc.
• Advancing theory and practice in designing for systems, etc.
• Design experiences in organizational systems and technology, etc.
• New possibilities for design exploration afforded by generative AI
• Concrete design projects and their outcomes

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Tuure Tuunanen (Primary Contact)
University of Jyväskylä
tuure@tuunanen.fi

Richard Baskerville
Georgia State University
baskerville@gsu.edu

Matthias Söllner
University of Kassel
soellner@uni-kassel.de

Digital technologies increasingly mediate and shape our work, organization, and daily lives. Innovations such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, blockchain, and Web3 technologies enhance various internal and external activities, including decision-making, collaboration, coordination, and control. Relevant contexts of interest — which impact diverse industries, such as healthcare, transportation, finance, military, and law enforcement — include, but are not limited to:

• New organizational forms and work arrangements
• Human-AI interaction across various contexts
• Autonomous systems on earth and in space
• Data sharing and use
• Transactional and innovation-based digital platforms
• Security and compliance applications
• Interorganizational and community collaboration
• Cryptocurrency and supply chain management

While human-machine interaction is crucial for the effective adoption of new digital technologies, vulnerabilities extend beyond weaknesses in these interactions. Vulnerabilities with digital technologies can arise from but are not limited to the beliefs, availability, or condition of technologies; use of technologies by other entities; embedded complexities with physical objects; and a variety of environmental and societal factors. 

The presence and interplay of trust traps, power asymmetries, and complacency significantly heighten these vulnerabilities for users and organizations. For example, trust traps can lead to over-reliance on humans or technology, while power asymmetries can create imbalances in control and access to information. However, digital technologies can also mitigate such vulnerabilities. They can provide more equitable access to information and resources as well as enhance effective coordination and collaboration. What challenges and opportunities arise from vulnerabilities with digital technologies and their mitigation? For example, how does digital responsibility play a role, and what is the role of trust, power, and complacency?

We welcome studies on when and why users become overly reliant on digital tools, leading to complacency and increased risk. Given growing uncertainty and weakening institutional trust, we encourage work on how declining confidence in public institutions and geopolitical tensions shape organizational decisions about adopting digital technologies. We also invite studies on how governance mechanisms, such as contracts, algorithms, or social norms best reduce vulnerabilities in digital collaborations like data sharing networks and ecosystems.

This minitrack aims to foster new understandings of vulnerabilities and explore strategies for counteracting and mitigating them in various organizational and work settings. We are particularly interested in under-explored aspects of trust, power, and complacency in relation to vulnerabilities across a wide array of digital technology contexts. The minitrack helps to advance discussion on vulnerabilities broadly speaking including but not limited to the following:

• What questions regarding trust, power differences, or complacency should be raised but are currently overlooked in the context of digital technologies?
• How are trust, power differences, or complacency manifested in ways that are rarely discussed in the literature?
• How can novel computational approaches shed new insight to vulnerabilities and their dynamics?
• How do different technological environments impact the trust, power, and complacency dynamics?

We welcome both theoretical and empirical papers that advance understanding of trust, power differences, and complacency in relation to digital technologies across various organizational and work settings. Submissions may employ any acceptable qualitative, quantitative (statistics and econometrics), or computational machine learning methods. We encourage interdisciplinary approaches and papers that consider multiple levels of analysis. We look forward to receiving innovative contributions that address these critical issues in the evolving landscape of digital technologies.

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Sirkka Jarvenpaa (Primary Contact)
University of Texas at Austin
Sirkka.jarvenpaa@mccombs.utexas.edu

Gene Alarcon
Air Force Research Laboratory
mos92a@gmail.com

Kirsimarja Blomqvist
LUT University
Kirsimarja.blomqvist@lut.fi

Gorkem Turgut Ozer
University of New Hampshire
gt.ozer@unh.edu

Organizations develop and deploy new types of human-machine configurations in which human and machine agents jointly create value. Agentic systems fueled by generative AI (GenAI) are now developed and deployed at industrial scale, using frameworks like LangChain or AutoGen and protocols like Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol. GenAI solutions are not merely hyped consumer products anymore but have become building blocks that can fundamentally revamp organizational routines and practices across industrial fields and applications. At the same time, traditional AI-based solutions such as for decision support continue to mature across processes, products, and services. AI is now a central ingredient of the fabric of organizations and is hence a central aspect of contemporary organizing.

As organizations become more reliant on AI, they need new management theories, frameworks, and methodologies to understand the implications. AI-based agents often rely on complex internal processing, and their behavior is less predictable than traditional IT artifacts. AI can automate and augment work in novel ways and even fuel creative processes. While the innovation potential appears unlimited, organizations must also ensure that AI-based systems meet ethical and legal requirements, and they must implement appropriate governance mechanisms and guardrails.

This minitrack aims to contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms through which humans organize together with and for the use of AI-based systems as well as the process organizations use to develop and deploy them. We aim to provide a platform for thought and discussion in this important and emergent field within information systems and IT research. We invite conceptual as well as empirical contributions using different methodological approaches (qualitative, quantitative, design-oriented, simulation, etc.). We think there is a need for case studies, trace data analysis, and ethnographies. We would prefer theory development pieces to frameworks and literature reviews. Potential questions and topics include, but are not limited to:

• What is the impact of using AI on processes traditionally seen as entirely human-driven?
• How can AI be useful in group and collective creative processes? What are the outcomes?
• How does coordination shift as AI-based systems are used, and what new organizational hierarchies and structures are emerging?
• What do nascent agent-based organizations like Moltbook suggest about all-AI or mostly-AI organizations?
• How do power relations change, and how do organizational actors use AI to reshape them?
• How can organizations evaluate the ethical implications and govern AI-based systems?
• What are relevant KPIs and metrics for assessing AI effectiveness?
• How should organizations manage, staff, and coordinate AI development teams?
• Trace data: How is AI actually being used in organizational practice?
• AI & coordination: How does AI change the way humans coordinate?
• AI & crypto: How can smart contracts and DAOs create new organizational forms? Are there interesting examples in enterprises? In the public sphere?
• AI & governance: Who runs the technology? What does the technology run?
• AI & software development: How to manage AI project and deployment risk?
• AI as coder: How well do Copilot and other tools work in terms of increasing programmer productivity?
• AI & creativity: How can humans and AI be co-creators? How should attribution work?
• AI & design: What has AI designed? Can and should it design itself?
• AI & innovation: How does AI foster or corrupt innovation?
• AI & news work: How does AI change news and civic engagement?
• AI & crowds: What do crowds do for machine learning, and what’s in it for the crowds?
• AI & organizational routines: How does AI change the nature of work?

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Stefan Seidel (Primary Contact)
University of Cologne
stefan.seidel@wiso.uni-koeln.de

Aron Lindberg 
Stevens Institute of Technology
aron.lindberg@stevens.edu

Jeff Nickerson
Stevens Institute of Technology
jnickers@stevens.edu

Jeffrey Saltz
Syracuse University
jsaltz@syr.edu

For decades, organizations have sought to better understand, analyze, and improve their business processes. Recent advancements in Process Technology have introduced fundamentally new ways to achieve these goals. In particular, Process Mining, AI-driven, and Generative AI (GenAI) approaches have unlocked unprecedented opportunities for data-driven business process management.

Process Mining enables organizations to leverage event data recorded by information systems to analyze and enhance process performance in areas such as efficiency, quality, resilience, and compliance. In parallel, AI- and GenAI-based Process Technologies support business process management across the entire lifecycle. For example, AI can assist process stakeholders through co-modeling and design support, enable predictive and prescriptive monitoring, automate process improvements, or facilitate autonomous and adaptive process execution through intelligent agents.

More recently, agent-based and agentic BPM approaches have emerged, where autonomous or semi-autonomous agents analyze, orchestrate, adapt, and execute processes, often in close collaboration with human actors. While these innovations create exciting possibilities for hyper-automation and self-improving processes, they also raise important organizational, ethical, and regulatory challenges. These include fairness, transparency, accountability, compliance, and the responsible use of AI, for instance through Explainable AI (XAI) and governance mechanisms.

Given the strong and growing interest in these topics in both academia and practice, the goal of this minitrack is to foster scientific exchange on Business Process Technology. The minitrack provides a forum for researchers to present and discuss innovative approaches, techniques, methodologies, and models for the design, adoption, implementation, operation, evaluation, and governance of data-driven and intelligent business processes. The Business Process Technology minitrack invites contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

• Process Discovery
• Conformance Checking and Analysis
• Decision Mining, Decision Analytics, and Decision Drift Analysis
• Declarative and Hybrid Process Analysis
• IoT-Aware Process Analysis and Technology
• Predictive and Prescriptive Process Monitoring
• (Explainable) AI and GenAI for Process Technology
• LLM-Driven Process Analysis and Management
• Agent-Based and Agentic Business Process Management
• Autonomous and Self-Adaptive Process Execution
• Multi-Agent Systems for Process Coordination and Control
• Human-in-the-Loop and Human–AI Collaborative Process Management
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• Hyper-Automation and Cognitive Process Automation
• Automated Process Analysis and Continuous Improvement
• Knowledge-Driven and Semantic Process Technologies
• Digital Twin Technologies for Business Processes
• Adoption, Value, and Impact of Process Technology
• Governance, Risk, and Compliance of Intelligent Process Technology

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Despite all the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalization, recent research findings and anecdotal observations have consistently revealed concerning evidence that these technologies may also be hiding potentially serious “dark sides” at individual, organizational, and societal levels. For example, from the organizational perspective, studies have shown that employees waste approximately one-fourth of their workday on digital interruptions. Similarly, employees’ misuse of organizational IT could account for 50-75% of all information security breaches. The situation is similarly concerning on the user’s side. For example, the increasing popularity of social media platforms has led to a significant rise in technology-mediated dangerous behaviors, including addictive and problematic IT use, sharing private information and falling victim to phishing scams, and individual deviant behaviors such as online harassment and swearing.

Furthermore, the rise of AI, i.e., “AI”ization, has added several new and complex concerns to this array of issues. Specifically, the rise of AI affords unfair and biased recommendations and deviant behaviors, such as algorithm aversion. Moreover, recent advancements in generative AI, such as large language models, their ability to generate human-like, convincing claims, and their innate tendency to “hallucinate” and generate fake images and videos (e.g., “deepfake” technology), are of particular concern. As these technologies are used for content generation on social media, their hard-to-detect hallucinations can further increase users’ likelihood of falling victim to misinformation. These concerns also raise questions about the social responsibility of technology giants as well as possible negative effects of technologies on children and youth.

To make matters worse, digital and AI technologies are increasingly facilitating both organizational and organized cybercrimes. Sadly, rarely a week goes by without a cybercrime being reported in the media, from cyberterrorism to hijacking individual accounts and hacking organizational systems, extortion, exit scams, fake investments, and blatant information manipulation for financial gain. The recent AI advancements, their accessibility, and the lack of regulations regarding their use have further intensified these concerns.

The fact that the digital and AI artifacts that we develop and the process we support may underlie such negative effects behooves us, as a research community, to pay closer attention to the “dark sides” of AI and digital technologies. Over the last eight years, this minitrack has advanced the understanding of such issues and the efficacy of solutions for mitigating them. We would like to continue this endeavor.

To that end, this minitrack welcomes papers examining the negative consequences of AI, digitalization, and IT use, in general, at individual, organizational, and societal levels, and potential solutions for mitigating them. The objective of minitrack is to focus not only on the antecedents, development processes, and consequences of numerous phenomena related to the negative consequences of AI and digital technologies but also on potential strategies, techniques, and design considerations for behavioral and technological interventions. We seek to build a forum of discussions that can provide a deeper understanding of the potential consequences regarding the dark sides of these technologies. Further, we hope this forum continues to shape guidelines for designing and implementing solutions to minimize the negative consequences of AI and digital technologies.

Submitted papers can focus on, but are not limited to, the following areas related to the dark sides of AI and digital technologies. We acknowledge that new forms and types of “dark sides” will emerge over time, and we are open to topics that may extend this list.

• Dark sides of artificial intelligence and/or robots, including ethical and moral concerns
• Dark sides of datafication
• Algorithmic bias, fairness, and prejudice
• Technology-mediated dangerous behaviors, such as IT addictions, misuse, abuse, and impulsive use
• IT interruptions and Cyber loafing
• Adverse psychological and physiological effects of AI and digital technologies
• Cyberviolence (e.g., cyberstalking, cyberbullying)
• Dark sides of social media
• Online Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news
• Cyberterrorism
• Privacy concerns about AI and digital technologies
• Cybercrimes and security concerns of AI and digital technologies, such as cybertrespass, cyberdeception and cyber-theft, Ransomware, and Phishing and scamming

Submissions are welcome and encouraged from different schools of thought (e.g., information systems, psychology, etc), which can advance our knowledge of the antecedents, processes, interventions, and consequences of the dark sides of AI and digital technologies.

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Isaac Vaghefi (Primary Contact)
Baruch College, The City University of New York
isaac.vaghefi@baruch.cuny.edu

Hamed Qahri-Saremi 
Colorado State University
Hamed.Qahri-Saremi@colostate.edu

Ofir Turel
University of Melbourne
oturel@unimelb.edu.au

Piotr Siuda
Kazimierz Wielki University
piotr.siuda@ukw.edu.pl

Societies are now migrating into a futuristic legal space whose structural conditions depend increasingly on the enabling and inhibiting aspects of cutting-edge digital technology. Private and public actors alike must therefore understand how data-driven and AI-enabled technologies can be used in a legitimate, necessary, and proportional way, and at the same time assess risks attached to their particular use trajectories. This is a complex balancing act that inevitably creates legal and ethical uncertainty, which generates ambiguous dilemmas and paradoxical tensions at different societal levels. As a result, these actors face a dynamically changing landscape in constant search of legal and ethical standards.

Given this complex digital transformation, data regulation, digital compliance, and platform governance have become front and center of legal and ethical debates. These discussions are fueled by a societal urge to ensure data use that meets desired levels of transparency, accountability, and privacy. Indeed, at the same time, emerging frameworks such as the EU AI Act, GDPR, and global data governance policies are ultimately reshaping how data is collected, processed, and managed.

Against this background, this minitrack explores the challenges, frameworks, and strategies associated with data regulation and governance in the context of data-driven and AI-enabled technologies. We seek papers that examine the intersection of these technologies and data protection laws, compliance mechanisms, algorithmic accountability, and emerging regulatory trends. Key topics include (but are not limited to) legal and ethical constraints on algorithmic data processing, cross-border data governance, privacy-enhancing technologies, and socio-technical implications of regulatory enforcement.

We invite researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to submit empirical, conceptual, or design-oriented research on data regulation, digital compliance, and platform governance. Topics of interest include:

• Regulatory Compliance in AI and Data Governance – Examining how organizations adapt to evolving data laws, including GDPR, the EU AI Act, and global regulatory frameworks
• Privacy, AI, and Data Protection – Investigating challenges related to personal data privacy, consent mechanisms, and privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs)
• Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability – Addressing regulatory demands for explainability, bias mitigation, and fairness in AI decision-making
• Cross-Border Data Regulation and Governance – Analyzing global trends in data sovereignty, data localization, and cross-jurisdictional governance challenges
• Compliance Automation and AI-Driven Governance – Exploring AI’s role in automated compliance monitoring, risk assessment, and regulatory enforcement
• Ethical AI and Responsible Data Use – Investigating ethical considerations in AI-driven data processing, including fairness, trust, and human oversight
• Balancing Regulation and Innovation – Examining how regulatory frameworks impact AI development, business models, and data-intensive research
• Security, Risk, and AI in Regulatory Compliance – Exploring AI’s role in cybersecurity, data protection, and risk management
• Emerging Global Standards and Interoperability – Analyze international efforts to harmonize AI and data governance regulations across jurisdictions

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Fatemeh Saadatmand (Primary Contact)
University West
fatemeh.saadatmand@hv.se

Rickard Lindgren 
Uppsala University
rickard.lindgren@im.uu.se

Organizations are increasingly integrating data, Business Intelligence & Analytics (BI&A), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their business models. However, achieving this transformation is not only a question of technology; it demands profound changes in how organizations think, organize, and lead. Both data management and BI&A/AI play critical roles in this transformation, each contributing uniquely to business success. Data management ensures the foundations for data quality, governance, and strategic alignment, providing the necessary infrastructure to manage data as a strategic asset and to enable scalable and trustworthy analytical and AI applications. BI&A and AI, on the other hand, turn this data into insights, predictions, automation, and innovations that drive business value and competitive advantage.

While the importance of data management, BI&A, and AI is well-recognized in practice, research on their distinct and combined contributions remains limited. In particular, the reciprocal relationship between data management and AI, where data management enables AI and AI increasingly augments data management, remains underexplored. Much remains to be learned about the artifacts, methods, and organizational capabilities necessary to harness them effectively—both independently and in tandem—and ultimately translate them into business value.

This minitrack seeks to spark forward-looking conversations on how organizations can navigate the individual and joint contribution of data management, BI&A, and AI to unlock business value. Papers using theory building, design research, action research, case studies, and analyses of existing or innovative applications are welcome. Given the practical relevance of the minitrack’s scope, we also invite practitioners to submit their work, provided it includes a conceptual or generalizable contribution. We invite papers that investigate topics which include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Business Intelligence & Analytics (BI&A) in the Data-Driven Organization
  1. Applications and organizational outcomes of BI&A
  2. Data visualization and storytelling
  3. Visual analytics and augmented analytics
  4. Collaborative analytics
  5. Data and analytics as a service, self-service BI
  6. Case studies of data and analytics-driven organizations
  7. User-driven innovation approaches for BI&A and/or data projects
  8. Citizen science for data and analytics
• Modern Data Management
  1. Data productization, valuation, and monetization
  2. Data quality, data cataloging
  3. Data/analytics/AI governance and strategy
  4. Next-level data and analytical architectures, such as data mesh architecture
  5. Successful cases of data-driven transformation
  6. Data/analytics/AI literacy as a democratizing force for value creation
  7. Data culture and data ethics
• Data-AI Integration
  1. Data management and AI as two sides of a coin: AI for data management, data management for AI
  2. AI-assisted data quality and automated metadata management
  3. Data architectures for enterprise and generative AI (e.g., RAG, vector databases)
  4. Knowledge graphs, ontologies, and semantic infrastructures for (generative) AI applications
  5. AI-enabled data architectures and conceptual modeling
  6. Case studies of AI-integration with data management and BI&A

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Barbara Dinter
Chemnitz University of Technology
barbara.dinter@wirtschaft.tu-chemnitz.de

Hippolyte Lefebvre
University College Dublin
hippolyte.lefebvre@ucd.ie

Roland Mueller
Berlin School of Economics and Law
roland.mueller@hwr-berlin.de

Decentralized Digital Economies focuses on the technologies, institutions, and governance mechanisms that enable value creation, coordination, and capture in blockchain-based and distributed ledger–driven economic systems. The minitrack serves as an umbrella venue for research on cryptocurrencies, tokens, decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), digital assets, and emerging ledger infrastructures that are reshaping markets, organizations, and public institutions. Moving beyond isolated applications, the minitrack emphasizes decentralized economies as a new class of digital infrastructures in which economic activity, governance, identity, and ownership are jointly redesigned through cryptographic protocols, smart contracts, and distributed coordination mechanisms. The minitrack invites work that examines how decentralized systems transform business models, organizational forms, governance structures, regulatory regimes, and the foundations of trust and value in the digital economy.

A fundamental shift in decentralized digital economies emerged with the introduction of smart contracts as programmable mechanisms for coordination, governance, and value exchange. Smart contracts encode contractual logic directly into software and enable the automated execution and enforcement of agreements without reliance on centralized intermediaries. By embedding rules, incentives, and verification procedures into digital infrastructures, smart contracts reduce transaction uncertainty and enable new forms of market design, organizational coordination, and institutional structures. In parallel, the emergence of Web3, Metaverse, decentralized platforms, and immersive digital environments are extending blockchain-based infrastructures beyond financial transactions toward integrated ecosystems of digital ownership, identity, and interaction. The convergence of distributed ledgers with technologies such as artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, edge computing, extended reality, and, in the longer term, quantum computing is creating new socio-technical architectures whose economic, organizational, and governance implications remain only partially understood. This minitrack therefore invites research that examines decentralized digital economies as evolving institutional infrastructures that reshape coordination, agency, and value creation at scale.

As decentralized digital economies expand, they are increasingly characterized by fragmentation across heterogeneous ledger systems, protocols, and application layers. Interoperability has thus become a central design and governance challenge, as value flows must be supported across Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks, sidechains, bridges, and cross-chain transfer protocols. While these mechanisms enable scalability and composability, they also introduce new risks related to opacity, traceability, and systemic fragility. In practice, cross-chain transfers, mixers, and privacy-enhancing mechanisms may obscure transaction histories and weaken transparency across interconnected infrastructures. As a result, interoperability not only raises technical questions but also fundamental governance and regulatory concerns regarding accountability, compliance, and the preservation of auditability in decentralized systems. This minitrack welcomes research that addresses interoperability as an economic, organizational, and institutional problem, including standards, governance models, and regulatory frameworks for sustaining trustworthy decentralized infrastructures.

Recent developments in decentralized digital economies have further accelerated the diffusion of stablecoins and token-based payment instruments as programmable monetary and settlement infrastructures. Stablecoins have become a central building block of decentralized finance by enabling on-chain settlement, liquidity provision, and automated financial services, yet their rapid diffusion raises critical questions regarding systemic risk, reserve management, governance concentration, and regulatory arbitrage. More broadly, tokenized forms of money challenge existing boundaries between private and public payment systems, centralized and decentralized intermediation, and innovation and financial stability. The minitrack therefore explicitly encourage research that examines the political economy, governance, ethical, and institutional implications of token-based monetary systems, including their effects on financial markets, payment infrastructures, monetary sovereignty, and the long-term architecture of digital economies.

This minitrack explores the transformative potential of distributed ledger technologies in enabling decentralized systems and innovation across industries and institutional contexts. It will address topics such as decentralized finance, tokenization, interoperability, smart contract governance, organizational design, ethics, regulation, and blockchain’s role in reshaping transparency, accountability, and trust. By bringing together technical, economic, organizational, and policy perspectives, the minitrack aims to advance a deeper understanding of how decentralized digital economies are designed, governed, and sustained. We welcome all types of papers that contribute to the academic discourse on decentralized digital economies

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Asger Balle Pedersen (Primary Contact)
IT-University of Copenhagen
asbp@itu.dk

Soulla Louca
University of Nicosia
louca.s@unic.ac.cy

Roman Beck
Bentley University
romanbeck@bentley.edu

The Circular Economy (CE) is a model of resource production and consumption that involves the principles of sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling materials and products, to extend product life cycles for as long as possible. As the appetite for circularity from multiples constituencies in societies is increasing, research has begun to focus on how these principles can be supported, particularly with the use of digital technologies. Scholars have found that artificial intelligence (AI) may enable the circular economy by optimizing resource allocation, leading to reduced waste. Also machine learning (ML) is transforming sustainable design by enabling faster optimization of complex circular systems. In addition, technological development around digital platforms may enable both firms and consumers to resell products increasingly cost-efficiently, hence scaling the reuse of products and raw materials. However, it has also been acknowledged that the use of digital technologies has still enormous uncovered potential within the CE.

In this minitrack, we call for both empirical and theoretical contributions on digital technologies in the CE. Potential paper topics include, but are not limited to:

• New digital technologies in supporting CE initiatives
• Transforming organizational relationships in CE transitions
• AI and machine learning (ML) in optimizing resource circulation
• Circular platforms and their emergence and evolvement
• Digital C2C and C2B sales/supply transactions
• Big data, AI and data analytics in creating transparency and resilience in circular supply chains
• Policies and regulation supporting/inhibiting digital CE initiatives

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Lauri Paavola (Primary Contact)
University of Eastern Finland
lauri.paavola@uef.fi

Annabelle Gawer
University of Surrey
a.gawer@surrey.ac.uk

Minna Heikinheimo
Tampere University of Applied Sciences
minna.heikinheimo@tuni.fi

This minitrack solicits high quality research that uses analytical, empirical, and experimental modeling approaches to explore the increasing complex interplays between information technology and business operations, strategies, and consumer decisions and activities. In particular, we seek novel studies that systematically explore the complex roles that artificial intelligence (AI), digitization, information technology, and business analytics play in consumer behavior, customer relationship management, organizational architectures, product design and development, healthcare, education, marketing, sales and services, and supply chain management to provide business insights and implications. We are also soliciting comprehensive reviews of relevant research, rigorous case studies, and applications highlighting the use of business analytics, new technologies, methods, and techniques in various business operations. There is a growing body of research within the economics, marketing, operations management, information systems, and healthcare communities which are starting to address those issues. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Application of business analytics and big data in healthcare
• Digital health and telemedicine
• New applications of healthcare IT
• Creative ideas and new approaches in IS&OM teaching
• Digital platforms and autonomous systems
• Business application of matching models
• GenAI and Agentic AI in business operations
• Impact of LLM and ChatGPT on business operations
• AI-driven productivity and task automation
• Emerging of new operating models for the “sharing economy”
• New technologies for enhanced consumers’ engagement
• Crowdsourcing and product innovation
• Social media implications for operations management and customer services
• Applications of real-time mobile analytics in business
• Impact of business analytics on competition and cooperation
• Managing big data and business analytics
• Innovations in using social data and business analytics
• Using advanced web analytics to influence consumer decision-making
• Products’ ranking algorithms, reputation systems and the performance of online markets sales
• Analytical models and machine learning applications in logistics
• Supply chain susceptibility and resilience to disruptions
• Impact of innovations in blockchain and fintech on business operations

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Abraham Seidmann (Primary Contact)
Boston University
AVIS@bu.edu

Yabing Jiang
Florida Gulf Coast University
yjiang@fgcu.edu

Jie Zhang
University of Texas at Arlington
jiezhang@uta.edu

Yaniv Ravid
Rutgers University
y.ravid@rotman.utoronto.ca

The rapid adoption of enterprise AI has moved technological dependencies to the center of Information Systems (IS) practice. As organizations and nations seek to decouple from tech monopolies to mitigate geopolitical risks and protect intellectual property, it is crucial to think beyond data residency and target more holistic approaches for AI and Data Sovereignty. This encompasses legal, operational, and technical controls over the entire AI lifecycle, from training data curation to the management of inference logs and model weights. This also influences strategic decisions for the design, implementation, and adoption of AI systems at the data, application, and model levels.

This minitrack aims to bring together scholars and practitioners to explore the socio-technical challenges of sovereign AI infrastructures. We invite papers that investigate how to balance technological autonomy with economic efficiency and global innovation. We welcome theoretical, empirical, and design-science research on topics including, but not limited to:

• Architectural Sovereignty: Design and evaluation of private cloud, edge, and on-premises infrastructures for hosting AI models
• Operational Governance: Strategies and frameworks to prevent vendor lock-in and ensure control over AI services
• Regulatory Engineering: Implementation of compliance and managing the jurisdictional tensions set forward by regulations such as the EU AI Act, of the U.S. CLOUD Act
• Privacy-Preserving AI: The role of privacy-enhancing technologies, such as Federated Learning and Differential Privacy, in maintaining sovereignty within collaborative ecosystems
• Socio-Cultural Alignment: Developing localized AI models to counter biases and preserve diversity
• Strategic Economics: Cost-benefit analyses of sovereign vs. public AI deployments regarding long-term ROI and risk mitigation

This minitrack seeks to bridge the gap between IT Governance, Digital Infrastructure, and Strategic IS Management. By fostering a dialogue on how sovereignty shapes the next generation of digital platforms, we aim to contribute to the foundational understanding of Digital Sovereignity in the age of AI.

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Timo Böttcher (Primary Contact)
SAP SE
timo.boettcher@sap.com

Tobias Müller
SAP SE
tobias.mueller15@sap.com

The complexity introduced by digitalization across sectors has challenged established ways of thinking, acting, and living. While technological development is often described as a hallmark of human progress, the use of digital technology can also limit people’s ability to cultivate their virtues and flourish. A growing body of research highlights negative consequences of digitalization, such as increased stress, inequality, anxiety, social disconnection, and more. These effects are often unevenly distributed across different social groups, communities, and contexts, as well as affecting more-than-humans, for example through the environmental consequences of algorithmic computation.

Understanding flourishing requires a shift from traditional anthropocentric views to an approach that recognizes the interdependence of all living and non-living systems and that acknowledges how power, privilege, and exclusion shape who benefits from digital advances. As digital technologies become central to human and ecological futures, determining their role in fostering both individual and collective flourishing in fair and inclusive ways becomes a critical challenge.

This minitrack provides a forum to explore, present, and discuss a broad range of issues related to flourishing in digitally enabled environments. Flourishing is a multidimensional concept that extends beyond individual well-being as it involves the continuing development of human potential while acknowledging the interconnectedness of human lives with more-than-human entities and ecosystems. Several critical questions arise when examining flourishing in contemporary organizations and society, questions that explicitly foreground justice, representation, and accessibility:

• What do humans need to flourish, especially across different identities, abilities, cultural contexts, and socioeconomic positions?
• How does digital technology impact flourishing differently for marginalized vs privileged groups of humans and more-than-humans?
• How can flourishing be promoted through digital innovation in ways that prioritize accessibility, inclusion, and equitable outcomes?
• How can organizations embed flourishing beyond human-centric goals into their digital transformation strategies?
• How do people from varied backgrounds and communities utilize digital technologies to enable flourishing across species, systems, and communities, and what barriers do some groups face?
• In what ways does digital technology enhance flourishing, and how does it detract from it, particularly in relation to structural inequities, algorithmic bias, and unequal access to resources?

We encourage scholars to explore how digital technologies can create opportunities for mutual flourishing, bridging the well-being of humans and the environments we inhabit together with other species. We aim to continue our minitrack’s vision of fostering research agendas on well-being and flourishing, and to stimulate discussions on more equitable futures shaped by digital technology.

We welcome papers that aim to advance our understanding of flourishing in digital environments across various levels (e.g., individual, group, organizational, societal, environmental) and from diverse perspectives (e.g., cultural, ethical, design, ecological, socio-political). We encourage not only empirical research but also conceptual, analytical, speculative, and theoretical contributions that expand our understanding of flourishing connected to digital technology. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Novel approaches to digital innovation that support human and more-than-humans flourishing, wellbeing and potential
• Management practices and their impact on human flourishing, inclusion, and fair treatment
• Consequences of digital technology for human and more-than-human flourishing across different demographic groups and contexts
• The socio-technical dimensions of human flourishing with attention to power, representation, and participation
• Use of digital technologies for human flourishing with a focus on accessibility, cultural responsiveness, and inclusion
• Ethical and moral dimensions of human flourishing, including fairness, justice, and accountability in algorithmic systems
• The role of wisdom, emotions, dignity, desires, and culturally situated values in shaping equitable forms of flourishing for all
• Environmental sustainability, justice, and flourishing across communities and species
• Post-anthropocentric and intersectional perspectives on flourishing that integrate ecological, social, and systemic equity

This minitrack invites research that broadens the concept of flourishing beyond traditional anthropocentric views. By recognizing the complex interplay between humans and more-than-humans, technology, and the environment, and the differential impacts of digitalization, we encourage scholars to engage with these questions and offer novel insights that pave the way for a more holistic, just, and inclusive understanding of flourishing and well-being in the digital era.

High quality and relevant papers from this minitrack will be selected for fast-tracked development towards Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems. Selected papers will need to expand in content and length in line with the requirements for standard research articles published in the journal. Although the minitrack co-chairs are committed to guiding the selected papers towards final publication, further reviews may be needed before a final publication decision can be made

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

This minitrack centers on a key puzzle in today’s AI-transformation: why many attempts to implement with artificial intelligence often don’t lead to producing lasting, measurable improvements in organizational performance – and how to systematically bridge this gap. Many organizations have launched AI pilots and proofs of concept, but only a few have achieved scalable deployments that demonstrate clear value. These outcomes can be structured hierarchically, for example into (1) operational impact (e.g., productivity gains, improved decision-making) and (2) business impact (e.g., financial outcomes, innovation, and strategic advantage).

The minitrack examines the organizational, technological, and strategic mechanisms that connect AI adoption to concrete performance outcomes. Moving beyond studies of isolated use cases or technical implementations, it emphasizes value realization, institutionalization, and scalability of AI within and across organizational units. Attention is given to the conditions under which AI initiatives progress from experimentation to routinized, performance-enhancing capabilities.

By integrating perspectives from information systems, strategy, and organizational research, the minitrack aims to advance theoretically grounded and empirically validated models of AI-driven value creation. Contributions are encouraged that explicitly measure organizational outcomes, develop or test performance frameworks, and explain variance in realized impact across firms, industries, and contexts. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• Organizational and governance factors shaping
• Alignment between AI-initiatives and business strategy;
• Metrics and methods for assessing AI value;
• Barriers to scaling AI beyond pilot projects;
• Value creation with agentic AI agents;
• Successful versus unsuccessful AI-adoption trajectories

Overall, this minitrack seeks to foster research on how AI can evolve from a promising technology into a dependable source of measurable organizational performance, complementing – but clearly distinct from – research areas focused mainly on collaboration technologies, system design, or human AI interaction.

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Emergent innovation which promises to benefit a company’s digital transformation and advancement is promising, but the implementors, managers and users are left with major challenges to achieve a successful technology transfer and to fully realize the value of IT innovations in the corporate setting. This minitrack addresses the many facets and challenges of integrating a technology innovation into the operations and systems of the corporate environment. This mini-track is open to exploration and research that addresses the various aspects of going from nascent individual innovation to a successful integration into corporate usage, with the benefits, failures, learnings and challenges encountered. Some studies will address the process and activities such as plans, procedures, designs, implementations, governance policies and/or management of the technology innovation. Other studies will address the technical details, various designs and levels of technology required work in seamless integration to achieve major improvements based on innovative technologies.

For example, the 2026 keynote speaker Rama Akkiraju, Vice President of AI/ML for IT at NVIDIA, emphasized the need to transition from simple single-LLM flows to more complex and integrated Artificial Intelligence (AI) into integrated ecosystems to achieve “Enterprise AI”. The title of her talk was “From LLMs to Living Systems: Applying Systems Science to Agentic AI in the Enterprise”. She shared a framework for “Agentic AI as a System” and she provided several practical corporate examples for the value-added benefits of matured AI merged into an integrated enterprise environment. “Enterprise AI” is the strategic application of AI technologies—including machine learning, natural language processing, and Large Language Models (LLMs)—across an entire organization to enhance business processes, improve decision-making, and boost efficiency at scale. Unlike experimental, small-scale AI, or individual AI use within desktop apps, it is integrated into existing systems to automate workflows, ensure data security, and drive high-value, measurable outcomes.

Unlike experimental, small-scale AI, or individual AI use within desktop apps, Enterprise AI is integrated into existing systems to automate workflows, ensure data security, and drive high-value, measurable outcomes. This framework lays the foundation for achieving fuller value from AI innovation with the goal of situating it fully and seamlessly within the Enterprise Ecosystem.

A similar challenge is faced by other technology innovations which have the promise to offer agility and advanced capabilities to an enterprise. To more fully realize business and social value, innovations need to be made “Enterprise- grade”, to be evolved, leveraged and fully integrated into the systems and operations, i.e. into the enterprise ecosystem. A multitude of innovations continue to evolve towards fuller realization: blockchain, autonomous systems, process automation, etc. The integration of technologies, business processes and systems within and between companies remains complicated and difficult. It brings many challenges and learnings at various levels: enterprise-level and inter-organizational (e.g., ecosystem-), team and individual level.

This minitrack welcomes submissions using any research methods. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Emerging Technologies: use with and integration into Enterprise Systems
  1. “Enterprise AI” to realize the integration of AI to allow Enterprise-grade solutions
  2. Advanced analytics as part of Enterprise, use of Machine Learning (ML), simulation, etc.
  3. Integration of financial services, cryptocurrency and blockchain
  4. Network oriented extensions including IoT, cloud, and other emerging technologies
  5. Maturing innovations into enterprise-grade and user-ready DIY capabilities (end user Do It Yourself) interfaces and capabilities
  6. Designing or maturing innovations and new technologies into “enterprise-grade” operational competitive capabilities as part of the integrated enterprise ecosystem
• Enterprise Strategy, Architecture & Platforms
  1. Enterprise strategy, competitive impact, and technology-enabled business models
  2. Enterprise architecture, reference models, and integrated system design
  3. Digital platforms: openness, modularity, governance, and interoperability
• Implementation, Operations & Lifecycle Governance
  1. ES implementation, application integration, and BPM/workflow systems
  2. Deployment strategies (cloud, hybrid, on-premise), migration, and vendor switching
  3. Cost management, TCO, and operational governance of ERP/extended systems
• Risk, Controls & Cybersecurity
  1. Risk assessment, cybersecurity, and ecosystem threats
  2. Internal controls, audit, and assurance in integrated/cloud environments
• Organizational & Industry Impacts
  1. Change management, human–system interaction, and org. transformation
  2. Industry-specific adoption, customization, and cross-enterprise coordination
• Data Governance & Decision Support
  1. Enterprise data governance, platforms, and cross-enterprise standards
  2. Data-driven decision support for managerial and architectural choices
• All other topics related to integrated business systems

Papers accepted for presentation at HICSS in this minitrack are considered for fast-track submission into four different journals:

• American Accounting Association (AAA) Journal of Information Systems
• AIS Transaction on Enterprise Systems
• International Journal of Accounting Information Systems
• Data & Analytics for Good

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Pamela Schmidt (Primary Contact)
Washburn University
pamela.schmidt@washburn.edu

Benedict Bender
University of Potsdam
Benedict.Bender@uni-potsdam.de

Sathya Narasimhan
Google
nsathya@google.com

In today’s global digital economy, organizations have little choice but to invest in IT and digital technology to be innovative and competitive. However, without the proper organizational capabilities and skills to use these digital assets effectively, organizations are at significant risk of wasting their investments and missing key opportunities for growth and competitiveness.

Against this context, the “IT governance and its mechanisms” minitrack focuses on the design and implementation of organizational capabilities and leadership skills required to be successful in digital transformation journeys. Topics of interest include:

• Conceptual and empirical papers related to IT governance (e.g. IT-decision making structures, investment, IT infrastructure etc.),
• IT governance and value creation or value protection
• Digital Transformation Initiatives
• Cybersecurity governance and resilience
• IT governance & IS leadership: Digital transformation issues from the perspective of the board and executive management (e.g., organizational culture, organizational structure, leadership, credibility of IT leadership, roles and responsibilities of the board of directors and CIO, aligning business strategy etc.)
• Digital business strategy, Digital posture, and Value creation
• IT Governance and Generative AI
• Governance of smart robot initiatives
• IT-business alignment, Social alignment between business & IT
• IT project portfolio governance
• IT agility, Governance of bi-modal IT, IT ambidexterity
• Governance of Cloud computing, Cloud strategy
• Governance of IT outsourcing, IT innovation
• Governance of digital platforms, digital infrastructures, and digital ecosystems
• Data governance, Data Ethics, Data Privacy, and Data Security
• Governing AI-driven organizations
• Enterprise IT governance frameworks: COBIT, ITIL, SAFe and other IT governance(-related) frameworks and standards
• Conceptual and empirical papers dealing with the regulatory perspective on the governance of IT and digital technology (e.g., GDPR, privacy, corporate governance codes, etc.)

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Steven De Haes (Primary Contact)
University of Antwerp
steven.dehaes@uantwerpen.be

Tim Huygh
Open Universiteit
tim.huygh@ou.nl

Anant Joshi
Maastricht University
a.joshi@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Understanding modern competition and organizational survival requires an even more solid understanding of how to manage platforms and ecosystems, as digital technologies have enabled unprecedented complementarities within and across industries. In this new “digital first” economy, transaction and innovation platforms have become dominant forms of organization. Importantly, platforms are no longer peripheral tools but increasingly serve as core organizing infrastructure across industries.
As scholars in this field, we face a landscape defined by (1) new phenomena, providing insights from (2) new empirics, that might (3) require new methods, and (4) new theories.

We ask scholars to revisit the foundational assumptions about how platforms and ecosystems are theorized and studied. We seek contributions that build, problematize, and theorize around established concepts such as network externalities and generativity, and explore how these systems are being fundamentally challenged and transformed by new technological forces and evolving socio-technical dynamics. We welcome a wide set of methodological approaches and theoretical backgrounds. These themes may inspire contributions:

1. Platforms & Ecosystems + Artificial Intelligence and Data:
The increasing centrality of AI and digital data suggest that mechanisms such as network externalities, generativity, or legitimization may no longer suffice to explain how platforms and ecosystems are organized, governed, and transformed. Some research suggests that algorithmic agency will replace managerial authority through automated coordination. Other emerging research emphasizes that algorithmic agency augments novel forms of interdependence. As the use of AI grows, platform providers collect more and more data to produce superior machine learning applications. This suggests a shift from platforms that create value through matching users and complementors, and managing data towards organizing through it. Determining how these logics coexist is essential for redefining current and future platform theories.

2. Platforms & Ecosystems + Resilience in a World of Global Challenges:
Platform ecosystems are vital tools for addressing grand societal challenges and building resilience when crises disrupt established ways of life and work. They help to absorb shocks, adapt, and transform to new stable states, for instance, by coordinating physicians during pandemics. Most platform theorizing, however, has been concerned with mechanisms explaining economic growth and development. In the past decades, we have witnessed a trend towards ever more interoperable IT infrastructures. The resulting interdependencies, however, are increasingly recognized from a national sovereignty perspective. Here, platforms play a pivotal role in measurements of societal, ecological, and economic impact of market offerings. We thereby seek research on platform ecosystems not just as tools for coordination in addressing grand challenges, but also as influential mechanisms on global economies and societies.

3. Platforms & Ecosystems + Innovation, Policy, and Purpose: Platforms and ecosystems promise accessibility and democratization of value creation and capture by inverting the firm or producing new labour markets in a sharing economy. We have, however, also learned that platform providers accumulate power, sometimes leading to the misuse of market dominance, affecting their environment. Recommendation systems of Instagram, for example, have been perceived as harmful for teenagers. Platforms thus impact important societal issues, though sometimes these effects are unintended or contradict stated goals. This raises broader questions about the institutional role of platform ecosystems, particularly how emerging algorithmic systems mediate responsibilities in practice, and how legitimacy, accountability, and responsibility are distributed across private actors, public authorities, and algorithmic systems. We welcome research examining how platform ecosystems co-evolve with innovation, policy, and purpose, including how policy interventions shape platforms and how platforms influence these domains in return.

4. Platforms & Ecosystems + New Methodological Approaches:
We are eager to widen the set of methodological approaches, including qualitative, computational, and quantitative empirical research, case-based research, field studies, design science, behavioural decision-making experiments, and conceptual research. Even so, we recognize that increased availability of usage, process, or environmental data may enable novel approaches to computational research, potentially allowing the generation of insights that can uncover micro mechanisms in platforms or illuminate the broader complexities of ecosystems. In addition, new ML capabilities provide novel avenues for qualitative inquiries.

Overall, we encourage authors to submit their best work to our HICSS minitrack and invite them to engage in collaboration between academia, industry, and policymaking. We thereby welcome submissions from industry and around the world.

In collaboration with the Editorial Board of Electronic Markets (EM), we are proud and happy to provide a fast-track option for selected papers to EM. EM is considered among the leading journals in information systems (impact factor 7.1). The journal is well-known for its research on platforms and ecosystems and thereby provides a perfect fit for submissions to this minitrack.

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Vladimir Sobota (Primary Contact)
University of Glasgow
vladimir.sobota@glasgow.ac.uk

Hannes Rothe
University of Duisburg-Essen
hannes.rothe@icb.uni-due.de

Jukka Huhtamäki 
Tampere University
jukka.huhtamaki@tuni.fi

Virginia Springer
University of Sydney
virginia.springer@sydney.edu.au

Today, organizational systems, networks, and critical infrastructures are increasingly targeted by determined malicious actors with advanced skills and resources. Such attacks have the potential for major disruptions to our society including damage to assets, people, and the environment. As a result, organizations—of all sizes and at all levels—are faced with the challenge of continuously, effectively, and efficiently protecting their systems while enabling and ensuring their mission. This minitrack aims to advance the knowledge and best practices for successful cybersecurity implementation and management within the context of modern organizations.

We invite submissions describing novel research results, best practices, and/or industry programs and experiences related to the continuous, efficient, and effective design, engineering, implementation, operation, and management of cyber defense, cyber analytics, and security operations systems and processes within the enterprise. This includes technical aspects, ethical and legal issues, governance, risk assessment and management, compliance, system audits, and strategic initiatives. The minitrack welcomes papers from human, technical, and process perspectives on organizational cybersecurity. Potential paper topics include, but are not limited to:

• Techniques and approaches for effective, efficient, and continuous event analysis and incident detection and response
• Techniques and approaches for effective, efficient, and continuous cyber defense and security operation programs
• Design and implementation of systems, techniques, and tools, and policies and procedures for successful security operation programs and Security Operation Centers (SOC)
• Frameworks, specifications, and verification languages and techniques for design, implementation, and management of cyber defense and security operations and system processes, policies, and configurations
• Techniques, processes, and tools for continuous risk management, identification, analysis, and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) strategies
• Techniques, processes, and tools for continuous cyber defense and advanced system, software, and application hardening, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and critical infrastructures
• Advanced techniques, processes, and tools for malware and malicious activity prevention and detection
• Advanced techniques, processes, and tools for continuous vulnerability assessment, cyber defense, and security operations
• Development of effective and efficient programs for security education, training, and awareness (SETA) programs across the organization
• Strategies for establishing successful organizational policies for social media privacy, workplace and public space monitoring, data protection, bring your own device (BYOD), mobile device management (MDM), and intellectual property protections
• Assessment and improvement of user perceptions of security practices and user acceptance of policy and technology

Selected papers from this minitrack will be recommended to the editors of Organizational Cybersecurity: Practice, Process, and People for fast-track review and publication of an extended version of the HICSS paper. The extended version must include at least 30% new material, cite the HICSS paper, and include an explicit statement about the increment (e.g., new results and findings, better description of materials, etc.) in the cover letter.

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Morgan Shepherd (Primary Contact)
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
mshepher@uccs.edu

David Kocsis
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
dkocsis@uccs.edu

Sandeep Suntwal
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
ssuntwal@uccs.edu

Chris Cain
Eastern Washington University
ccain7@ewu.edu

This minitrack encourages practice-based research on new and emerging IS issues in organizations. Practice-based research bridges the gap between academic theory and practice. It aspires to introduce researchers to state-of-the-art practices and topics from industry and introduce managers to research that makes sense and brings coherence to the problems they face. The methods used in practice-based research are often exploratory field-based studies involving interviews, observations, and practice data. The intense pressure to achieve methodological distinction and theoretical contribution frequently results in researchers’ current practice-based topics being eschewed because the topics themselves are not mature enough in practice to attain desirable samples or sample sizes, nor are they conducive to theorizing since so little is known. These are precisely why exploratory, practice-based research can play a tremendous role in helping establish and lay the foundations of a research domain while providing insights into an emerging topic.

The objective of this minitrack is to encourage practice-based research in information systems and disseminate the research results in a manner that makes its relevance and utility readily apparent. This minitrack invites authors to submit in-depth research that provides rich stories, unique insights, and valuable conceptual frameworks for information systems practice. Papers might be based upon single cases, multiple cases, field interviews, or, less commonly, literature itself. Experimental research and survey research are less likely to achieve the goal of providing rich insight for practice. While it is assumed that researchers are guided by theory, it is not expected that the submissions to this minitrack make distinct or novel theoretical contributions. The contributions should focus on distinct and unique lessons for practice. Overall, this minitrack aims to:

• Showcase high-quality practice-oriented IS research
• Promote practice-oriented IS research as a key source of insight and guidance for digital leaders
• Provide researchers a platform to present and discuss their practice-oriented IS research findings and expose the community to current challenges in creating value with IT
• Help identify the most challenging managerial issues for digital/IT leaders and frame them as new questions to guide future practice-oriented IS research

The minitrack chairs coordinate with the MIS Quarterly Executive (MISQE) in selecting papers for fast-tracking to an issue of MISQE. Authors of promising papers will be encouraged to pursue publication in the MISQE. Feedback in review and feedback during the presentation is targeted to such publication strategy.

Additional guidance for authors of practice-based IS research papers

This practice track has run for many years at HICSS. We seek research with strong relevance for practitioners and manuscripts written to make them easily accessible to such a reader. This means that any accepted manuscript will not follow the traditional “rules” of writing for an academic audience.

If you are not a regular reader of MISQE, we advise you to read a few articles to understand their style, structure, focus, and content. Some general guidelines for writing such articles include:

• Simplify reality, but do not be simplistic
• Keep theory and methodology in the background (include your methods in an appendix, but write it to be accessible to non-academic readers).
• Use literature and in-depth evidence to give credibility and generalizability.

Typically, such articles loosely follow this structure:

• Short lead-in: Motivate the practitioner reader in 2-3 sentences. Why should they read the article? What you write should resonate closely with them; perhaps it is a problem that they recognize that you will now help them solve.
• Short introduction to the topic: Frame the topic of the article. Use footnotes rather than the traditional academic referencing style when using prior research.
• Extensive research findings: Use headings and figures/tables to communicate findings. Address solutions to managerial challenges. Present lessons learned from the research and recommendations. Possibly develop and/or use a practice-oriented framework to organize and present findings.
• Actionable guidelines: Actionable guidelines include action verbs, not passive verbs like “understand,” “assess, “think,” or “get commitment.” Tell the reader what to do, or what to change. For example, if getting commitment is important, say how to get the required level of commitment.
• Appendix: Present an overview of research methods. Remember to write in a way accessible to an audience unfamiliar with academic research’s nuances.

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Gabriele Piccoli (Primary Contact)
Louisiana State University
gpiccoli@lsu.edu

Michael Milovich, Jr.
Rowan University
milovich@rowan.edu

Martin Mocker
Reutlingen University
mmocker@mit.edu

The ongoing digitalization and cyberization of modern societies have increased reliance on socio-technical systems across domains such as critical infrastructure, industry, homes, and services. Examples include smart grids, smart manufacturing, smart home ecosystems, and digital payment systems. As these systems become more complex, tightly integrated, and foundational to highly interconnected societies, their economic and societal significance grows. This development highlights the need to systematically study and strengthen their preparedness and resilience.

From a socio-technical systems perspective, systems simultaneously pursue instrumental outcomes, such as efficiency and productivity, and humanistic outcomes, including well-being, equality, and freedom, as emphasized by scholars such as Enid Mumford. Socio-technical systems are embedded in social, economic, organizational, and political contexts, and their performance cannot be understood in purely technical terms. Instead, outcomes emerge from interactions among technologies, institutions, human actors, organizational arrangements, and prevailing norms.

Within this perspective, preparedness and resilience are distinct, yet interdependent properties that unfold over time. Preparedness concerns the anticipatory development of organizational, technical, cognitive, and institutional capacities to anticipate, respond to, and recover from disruptive events through advance planning, training, resourcing, and coordination. Resilience focuses on system performance under stress, including the ability to absorb disturbances, adapt functioning, and restore essential functions, structures, and identity after shocks. Although analytically separable, preparedness and resilience are mutually reinforcing and cannot be reduced to technical design choices alone.

Both preparedness and resilience emerge from tightly coupled socio-technical configurations in which technologies, human judgment, norms, and decision-making interact. Early warning systems, for example, depend not only on sensors and algorithms but also on trust, sense-making, and collective action. Similarly, cybersecurity incident response relies on distributed expertise and decision-making under uncertainty rather than on automation alone. Advancing preparedness and resilience therefore requires research that explicitly addresses the co-evolution of technological infrastructures and social institutions.

One example of this interconnectedness appears in the research and deployment of AI‑based solutions. As contemporary AI systems—such as autonomous agents built on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) — transition from pure research into real-world use, their capacity to act and adapt rapidly within critical infrastructures becomes increasingly important. These agent-based systems are designed explicitly to enhance system resilience, which is why properties like post‑training robustness (e.g., to marginal distribution shifts) and explainability are active areas of investigation. Yet these aspects are seldom examined systematically, integrated into a unified architecture, or validated for real-world—and especially real‑time—operational contexts. This underscores the socio‑technical nature of such technologies: their challenges cannot be solved within the technical domain alone. Once validated, these systems must operate in concert with human operators. They should relieve operators from processing high‑velocity, low‑level information, and instead support strategic decision-making. At the same time, the system’s effectiveness depends on its acceptance by the human operator.

This minitrack encourages submissions employing a variety of research methods, including design science, quantitative, and qualitative approaches. It invites articles from the following topics but is not limited to: 

• Governance, planning and coordination for system preparedness and resilience
• Digital capabilities, infrastructures, and resources for system preparedness and resilience
• Digital communications and information sharing
• Resilience, adaption, and recovery
• Design of resilience or preparedness related systems
• Inherent paradoxes between preparedness and resilience vs. innovation and flexibility
• Risk intelligence and foresight
• Analytics for system preparedness and resilience
• Critical infrastructure resilience
• Information preparedness and resilience
• AI-enabled preparedness or resilience
• Preparedness and resilience across domains and boundaries
• Preparedness and resilience in innovative contexts (e.g., robotics, drone management)
• Human sensemaking and behavior for system preparedness and resilience
• Training, learning and foresight
• AI-based systems for resilience with human operator feedback
• Organizational and inter-organizational resilience
• Equity and social vulnerabilities
• Theories and methods for preparedness and resilience
• Dynamic Proactive Systems Resilience
• Regulatory issues in developing system preparedness and resilience

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Tero Vartiainen (Primary Contact)
University of Vaasa
tero.vartiainen@uwasa.fi

Mike Mekkanen
University of Vaasa
mike.mekkanen@uwasa.fi

Eric Veith
OFFIS
eric.veith@offis.de

Quang “Neo” Bui
Rochester Institute of Technology
qnbui@saunders.rit.edu

Emergency managers face problems at three distinct levels that are intertwined due to varied emergent incident response situations.

Technology problems: Specialized emergency management software often gets abandoned. For example, one emergency manager told us that their dedicated platform cost 50% of the budget, took forever to learn, and limited who could use it. They switched to Microsoft Teams because everyone already knows it and it is cheaper. Another said cybersecurity rules prevent them from using helpful tools. There are platforms that would benefit us in the Emergency Operations Center, but we cannot use them because they do not meet Information Technology security criteria and it handicaps our situational awareness.

Organizational problems: Where emergency management sits in an organization’s hierarchy shapes everything. As one emergency manager who researched this put it, if emergency management is buried under the fire department, nobody takes it seriously. If it is at the top, preparedness becomes part of the culture. People see it matters because of where the organization placed it. Some emergency managers have executive support and get million dollar investments. Others are two person shops with no leadership buy in.

Coordination problems: Disaster response requires agencies to work together despite using different radio frequencies, different software, different command structures, and having weak relationships. One emergency manager noted that communication is always the failure point. Despite two decades of federal investment in interoperability, agencies still cannot talk to each other during emergencies. One said millions spent since 2008. Problem still is not resolved. These levels interact in a varied and emerging fashion during the entire lifecycle of emergency management endeavour: Technology fails without organizational support. Organizations cannot respond without coordination mechanisms. Coordination depends on both compatible technology and structures that enable collaboration.

We are looking for papers that examine one or more of these levels. We welcome different methods such as interviews, surveys, case studies, network analysis, and field evaluations. What matters is that the research addresses real problems emergency managers face and offers insights EMs, technology vendors, and policymakers can use. Topics of interest to include:

• Emergency management software adoption and abandonment
• Cybersecurity versus operational effectiveness in adaptive system
• Organizational leadership placement and culture
• Leadership support and resource allocation
• Communication technologies interoperability including mobile, radio, and satellite technologies
• Information sharing across agencies and organization in emergent situations
• Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster networks and regional coordination
• Public private partnerships in disaster response
• How organizational factors affect technology’s adoption
• How technology enables or constrains coordination

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Dipakkumar Pravin (Primary Contact)
University of North Texas
Dipakkumar.pravin@unt.edu

Ila Manuj
University of North Texas
Ila.Manuj@unt.edu

We invite contributions that engage philosophically, theoretically, methodologically, and/or empirically with various socio-technical phenomena. Submissions may include, but are not limited to, research papers (conceptual, theoretical, and empirical), case studies, and best practices/lessons learned. We also welcome research-in-progress studies that strive to problematize or transcend established boundaries (theoretical, disciplinary, methodological, etc.).

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Dragos Vieru (Primary Contact)
Teluq University
dragos.vieru@teluq.ca

Nura Jabagi
Laval University
nura.jabagi@fsa.ulaval.ca

Simeon Vidolov
University of Galway
simeon.vidolov@universityofgalway.ie

Albert Plugge
Nyenrode Business University
a.plugge@nyenrode.nl

This minitrack is special. It is set up to provide a forum for papers in the Organizational Systems and Technology track that do not “fit” exactly in a specific track. We often serve as an incubator for new ideas.

Over the years we have actively solicited non-traditional, imaginative, and thought-provoking research in any IT area. We are particularly interested in papers that break new ground in new areas, or those that apply existing research to new industry groups or fields. The papers that we accept generally have the following characteristics:

• They are cross-disciplinary – can be disciplines other than MIS.
• They address current topics that are important to today’s managers.
• They have a practitioner “flavor.”
• Case studies are welcomed, particularly if they propose questions that will stimulate discussion among session attendees.

Minitrack Chairs:

Jim Ryan (Primary Contact)
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
jryan@wpi.edu

Christopher Califf
Western Washington University
califfc@wwu.edu

Doaa Alrefaei
King Abdulaziz University
Dmalrefaei@kau.edu.sa

The Valuation of Technology minitrack investigates how the value of emerging technologies is conceptualized, assessed, and realized across diverse organizational, market, and social contexts. As digital transformation reshapes industries, the valuation of technology has become increasingly complex and driven not only by technical performance or financial metrics, but also by adoption behaviors, created intellectual property, ecosystem dynamics, and decision-making processes of both users and technology companies.

This minitrack invites research that advances theoretical, empirical, and methodological understanding of how technology value is created, forecasted, negotiated, and captured throughout the innovation lifecycle. We particularly encourage work integrating decision theories, behavioral models, and socio-technical perspectives to explain how stakeholders perceive and act upon the potential value of new technologies. The valuation of technology is inherently intertwined with technology adoption and diffusion. Adoption patterns influence expected returns, risk assessments, and long-term value realization. Conversely, valuation signals such as pricing, investment flows, or perceived strategic importance shape adoption decisions among users, firms, and public institutions. This bidirectional relationship and value co-creation are central to the minitrack’s focus. We encourage the submission of both theoretical and empirical papers, and all types of methods including qualitative and quantitative are welcome. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following areas:

• Valuation methodologies for emerging, uncertain, or rapidly evolving technologies
• Decision theories of consumers and producers, including rational choice, bounded rationality, behavioral economics, prospect theory, and heuristics in valuation and adoption
• Technology adoption and diffusion as determinants of realized and perceived value
• Economic, financial, and strategic models for technology investment and commercialization
• Intellectual property development
• Valuation challenges in AI, data-driven systems, digital platforms, and socio-technical infrastructures
• Organizational and ecosystem factors influencing valuation, including complementarities, network effects, and interoperability
• Societal, environmental, and policy dimensions of technology value, including public-sector investment and regulatory frameworks
• Valuation in public–private partnerships, grant-funded initiatives, and innovation ecosystems
• Behavioral and cognitive biases affecting valuation decisions by investors, managers, policymakers, and users
• Comparative studies of valuation practices across industries, countries, and institutional settings

The minitrack aims to bring together scholars from information systems, innovation studies, economics, strategy, entrepreneurship, behavioral science, and public policy. By integrating valuation research with adoption theory and decision-making models, the minitrack seeks to build a more holistic understanding of how technology value is co-created, transformed, and amplified through stakeholder choices.

Minitrack Chairs:

Pawel Kossecki (Primary Contact)
Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University
pawel@kossecki.pl

Yochanan Shachmurove
City College and City University of New York
yshachmurove@ccny.cuny.edu