Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2000

Citation

Hope, B. (2001), "Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2000", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 18 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2001.23918dac.003

Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2000

Beverley Hope

The 11th Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS2000) was held at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia on December 6-8, 2000. This annual conference is the focal meeting point for Information Systems researchers in Australasia. Its aim is to promote a strong discipline by providing a forum for discussion and interaction among academics and policy makers. The conference has earned a valued reputation for promoting research and is among the top five academic IS events worldwide.

The theme of ACIS2000, "The IT skills crisis: partnering with academe", sought to focus on the ways in which industry and academic institutions might work together to overcome current shortages of graduates with requisite IT skills. Such a partnership could yield benefits to both parties. As Alan Underwood, Organising Committee Chairman, commented, "True partnership is a two-way street, and in order to get maximum benefit academia must be prepared to give as well as to take, and listen as well as to talk".

The Programme

The conference attracted over 180 submissions, which were subjected to a double blind review process resulting in acceptance of 94 papers and six panel sessions. These were distributed over four parallel streams running for two days, with a third day devoted to a Doctoral Consortium. Information systems and technogy (IST) topics included, inter alia:

IST in developing countries;

IST in small and medium enterprises;

social implications of IST;

public sector IST;

medical IST;

IST education;

IST research methods;

ontology for IST;

IST strategy;

IST and end-users;

IST support for groups and teams;

IST development;

information resource management;

e-business;

enterprise resource planning;

knowledge planning.

Keynotes

In addition to refereed papers, the conference heard presentations from two invited keynote speakers.

On the first day, Professor David Avison from ESSEC Business School, France, addressed the conference. Professor Avison is a prolific writer, conference speaker and organiser, and Chair of the IFIP 8.2 working group on the impact of IST in organisations. In his presentation on the topic "The strategic value and low status of information systems", Professor Avison drew attention to the paradox in which IST can be critical to an organisation's ability to conduct and develop business, yet the IST function in an organisation is often considered a secondary activity. Through an exploration of the literature, he developed evidence confirming the low status of IST activities in many organisations. He concluded that IST could be fully exploited only if there was an increase in status of the IST function.

On the second day, the conference heard from the doyen of Management Information Systems research and education, Professor Gordon Davis from the Graduate School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Together with other colleagues at the University of Minnesota, Professor Davis founded the first graduate degree programme in Management Information Systems in 1968. In his presentation titled "Systems conceptual foundations: looking backward and forward", Professor Davis provided an overview of the development of the conceptual foundations of the IST discipline. He commented on the habit of the IST discipline to borrow concepts from other fields, but believed that, as the discipline evolves, the number and scope of foundation concepts will reduce.

Industry Breakfast

The tradition at ACIS is to have three keynotes, with one drawn from industry. At ACIS2000 a special Industry Breakfast on the second day met this desire for academe to interface with industry. At the breakfast, Cameron Moroney, CEO of corProcure, spoke on "B2B eMarkets ­ reality bites: the who, what, why, when and where of corProcure". CorProcure is Australia's first and largest horizontal B2B marketplace.

Southern Cross University at the beautiful Coffs Harbour on the Pacific Coast Road of New South Wales, Australia, will host ACIS2001. Conference sessions will be held 5-7 December, with the Doctoral Consortium and pre-conference workshops on 4 December (http://infotech.scu.edu.au/ACIS2001/index.html)

Beverley Hope is Lecturer in the School of Communications and Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her teaching and research interests are in the general area of information systems, with specialisms including service quality (Beverley.Hope@vuw.ac.nz)