Association of Information Systems (AIS) 2011 Conference (http://amcis2011.aisnet.org)

I had the honor of Chairing the session on IT Strategy & Management at Association of Information Systems (AIS) Conference today (Friday, 5th August 2011) morning. The Conference attracted over 750 researchers from 45 countries alongwith several business sponsors and executives. My session had 3 research papers presented by doctoral students from leading global universities.

The first research paper “A broadened approach to understanding IT Organizational Structure” was presented by Eric Larson (under guidance from Prof. Carl Adams) from Carlson School of Management, Minneapolis, MN.  The paper researched the implications of alternate structures of IT organization from three configurations, i.e. partner configurations (where IT creates divisions within itself so those IT divisions can align with different business divisions closely), platform configurations (wherein IT organization emphasizes integration between its different business units and creates a common structure serving all businesses) and scalable configuration (which is dynamic and created to improve flexibility). Eric’s research was fantastic as it showed counter-intuitive findings. Example, the correlation between partner configuration and specialization was negative! Eric plans to do further research on the topic to validate his findings.

The second paper was “A comprehensive information model for business change projects” by Sabine Wilfling (under guidance from Prof. Ulrike Baumoel) from University in Hagen, Germany. The paper emphasized the role played by cultural and emotional factors on complex change projects undertaken by IT organizations. There has been very little research on how to analyze these cultural and emotional factors and Sabine’s research paper provided a high-level structure of how these factors interact with business strategy, IT organization and processes.

The third paper was “Designing a reference model for Risk and Compliance Management for Cloud Computing Services” by Benedikt Martens (under guidance from Prof. Teuteberg) from University of Osnabrueck, Germany. In cloud computing environments the location of data may be distributed or may shift or remain unknown.  Thus the traditional way of applying jurisdiction based on location of data will not work.