Aims and scope

The interdisciplinary interfaces of Information Systems (IS) are fast emerging as defining areas of research and development in IS. These developments are largely due to the transformation of Information Technology (IT) towards networked worlds and its effects on global communications and economies. While these developments are shaping the way information is used in all forms of human enterprise, they are also setting the tone and pace of information systems of the future. The major advances in IT such as client/server systems, the Internet and the desktop/multimedia computing revolution, for example, have led to numerous important vistas of research and development with considerable practical impact and academic significance. While the industry seeks to develop high performance IS/IT solutions to a variety of contemporary information support needs, academia looks to extend the reach of IS technology into new application domains. Information Systems Frontiers (ISF) aims to provide a common forum of dissemination of frontline industrial developments of substantial academic value and pioneering academic research of significant practical impact.  
  
Information Systems Frontiers will focus on research and development at the IS/IT interfaces in the academia and industry. The interfaces include the base disciplines of computer science, telecommunications, operations research, economics and cognitive sciences, for instance. Emerging areas that ISF will concentrate on in the next few years include, but are not limited to:

    enterprise modeling and integration
    emerging object/web technologies
    information economics
    IT integrated manufacturing
    medical informatics
    digital libraries
    mobile computing and electronic commerce.

The publication highlights of ISF are:

Focus

    Provide a forum for both academicians and industry specialists to explore the multiple frontiers of the IS/IT field
    Bring innovative research on all aspects of IS/IT interfaces from analytical, behavioral and technological perspectives 

Format

    Published bimonthly, with dedicated issues on a regular basis as well as a general issue per year
    Internet support with abstracts, fast track reviews, discussion groups and a variety of other services

Content

    Theories and models of IS/IT systems and solutions
    Pragmatic solutions to practical IS/IT problems
    Computational, empirical and system developmental studies
    Perspectives synthesizing recent developments in interface areas
    State-of-the-art, state-of-the-market, state-of-the-practice surveys
    Reviews of challenges, solutions and lessons learned in practice
    Management
    An Editorial Advisory Group and an Editorial Board both including outstanding individuals fro academia and industry
    Eminent guest editors for the dedicated issues,
    Editors of websites managing and maintaining the internet services. 

Officially cited as: Inf Syst Front 

Special Issue on Being Responsibly Digital
Submission Date: 2024-09-30

Digital technologies have become pervasive and bear implications for the way we work and live, both positive and negative, purposeful as well as unintended. Artificial Intelligence (AI), for instance, demonstrates potential in several sectors ranging from healthcare (e.g., He et al., 2023; Heising & Angelopoulos, 2022) to agriculture (e.g., Despoudi et al., 2021), while distributed ledger technology can enable accountability among untrusted parties, especially in cases such as supply chains (Baharmand et al., 2021), despite being criticised for its resource intensive operation and negative environmental footprint (Zamani, 2022). Such technologies, however, tend to be mostly presented under a veil of positivity suggesting merely beneficial implications, with policy and regulations paying scant attention to their dark sides. Indeed, oftentimes, digital transformation endeavours are framed as the best solution for tackling delays, and bureaucracy and improving processes, and operations (e.g., Angelopoulos et al., 2023). Such policies highlight efficiencies and productivity gains as if they are achievable in a deterministic fashion. In addition, the discourse in both the literature and practice focuses on improved accuracy in systems and better-informed decision-making. Yet, such framing is typically underpinned by an economy-focused agenda (Petrakaki et al., 2018) rather than a balanced account of what might be the possible benefits as well as the negative implications.

A more responsible perspective on the implementation and adoption of digital technologies would acknowledge the difficulties in harnessing their benefits, efficiencies, and gains. Such a perspective would address the issues of stewardship of personal data (e.g., Angelopoulos et al., 2021), the lack of digital skills, digital poverty, infrastructural barriers (Zamani & Vannini, 2022), as well as scepticism and low levels of trust (Robert et al., 2023). Such issues, however, might go beyond the inability to benefit from digital technologies and lead to real and considerable harm, whereby the negative consequences are downplayed (Lioutas et al., 2021) either by omission or commission. Such harms are observed amongst the most underserved, and marginalised (Alexopoulou et al., 2022). In the case of asylum seekers, for example, AI enabled systems can reinforce and further proliferate biases and stereotypes, and discriminate against the most vulnerable, based on facial features, accents, and other characteristics (Beduschi, 2021).

There have been several recent calls for further examining what responsibility might entail in the implementation and adoption of digital technologies within and around organizational settings (e.g., Merhi, 2023), and especially in terms of digital transformation endeavours (Pappas et al., 2023). Such calls suggest that a better understanding is needed, particularly at the level of stakeholder engagement within the context of IT (Kar & Kushwaha, 2023) and research projects (Wakunuma & Stahl, 2014), especially when what is explored relates to addressing complex sociotechnical phenomena (McCarthy et al., 2020). The extant Information Systems (IS) literature on the topic, however, is faced with two major shortcomings. First, most recent studies with a responsibility focus tend to be interested in buzzword-related phenomena, which has taken attention away from the implications that digital technologies have for individuals and society. Second, the concept of digital responsibility itself is not particularly well developed. While there are several responsibility related frameworks, these do not always allow for a deep understanding of the concept of digital responsibility and remain vague and abstract at best. What they do seem to have in common, however, is a shared focus on the social desirability of the outcome of the research and innovation process (Stahl et al., 2013), or—simply put—IS artefacts that make the world a better place (Davison et al., 2023).

This Special Issue draws attention to the concept of digital responsibility, particularly within the context of digital technologies. We wish to encourage further research into a broad spectrum of digital technologies, including emerging as well as disruptive ones. We invite submissions from all ontological and epistemological perspectives and traditions, empirical and conceptual papers. Our broad goal for the special issue is to attract papers that articulate the challenges theoretically and study them empirically, while making a strong contribution to the theory (Struijk et al., 2022) and practice (Davison, 2023) of digital responsibility. We are not interested in purely methodological contributions or literature review papers on the topic.

Indicative (but not exclusive) list of relevant thematic areas and topics:

• Novel conceptualisations of digital responsibility, at various levels of analysis (individual, policy, organisational, societal)
• Intended and unintended consequences of emerging technologies
• Contrarian approaches to digital transformation accounts
• Digital poverty versus the digitalisation of national health and social care systems
• Critical analysis of digitalisation and digital transformation projects in terms of (ir)responsibility
• The implications of digitalisation for the digital divide, digital poverty and digital exclusion
• Trade-offs between digital responsibility and innovation processes

Forms of Submission

This Special Issue invites i) submissions through an open call for papers and ii) submissions by invitation from the 2024 UK Academy of Information Systems Conference, whereby the latter will need to be significantly extended and modified versions of accepted papers, with a clear explanation as to how the submitted paper has been extended following the conference.

All papers submitted to the Special Issue will be subject to the review process and submission guidelines of the Information Systems Frontiers. Papers must be submitted via the Information Systems Frontiers submission system, and the authors must select the corresponding Special Issue during the submission process through the drop-down menu. All papers submitted to the Special Issue will need to follow the format guidelines of the Information Systems Frontiers:

https://www.springer.com/journal/10796/submission-guidelines

Submission Deadline: September 20th, 2024

Special Issue on Digital Adoption, Cyber Risks and Value Destruction in Organisations
Submission Date: 2024-10-14

As the global economy transition from the industrial society to the information society, or what is variously described as the knowledge economy, the ability of organisations to access and harness information has become the critical factor that defines their competitive strategies. The advent of the information society has coincided with the ubiquity of the internet and rapid uptake and growing popularity of digital technologies. Businesses are increasingly deploying digital technologies to explore and exploit new vistas of opportunities to create, deliver and capture value. Public sector organisations, not lagging too far behind, are using digital tools and products to expand and improve access to key services, thereby bringing new opportunities to otherwise excluded communities and disadvantaged demographics.

Before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the pace of digital innovations over the last decade had already led to discussions about the disruptive impacts of digital transformation in the global economy. Artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and other forms of ‘smart automation’ are poised to contribute up to 14% of global GDP by 2030 (PWC, 2018). This is an equivalent of more than $15 trillion at today’s values. Digital technology has become ubiquitous and interwoven with all of life (Marshall et al., 2020). The process of digital transformation, which has been gathering pace over the past decade, was accelerated by the advent of Covid-19 pandemic. Its wide-ranging and far-reaching implications have been seen in areas such as home/remote working, disruptive innovations for logistics and supply chains, growing interest in decentralised finance, digitally-enabled sharing economy, and the disruptive impacts of artificial intelligence across a whole spectrum of the global economy.

However, as digital technologies have opened up windows of vast new opportunities, they have also precipitated new risks for organisations. The current reality is that many, if not most, organisations in the world are over-exposed to cyber risk. Cyber criminals do not only steal data, they also disrupt services and operations across the supply chains (Lee, 2021). For small and medium scale enterprises, whose vulnerabilities are exacerbated by resource deficits and information asymmetries, cyber-attacks precipitate significant loss of income and can limit opportunities that could otherwise be harnessed through digital transformation. According to recent estimates, the cost of global cybersecurity damages doubled from $3 trillion in 2020 to $6 trillion in 2021(Benz and Chatterjee, 2020). This is the equivalence of the world’s third largest economy in GDP terms, representing the biggest transfer of economic wealth in history (Morgan, 2020). In effect, the economic damage of cyber risk is worse than those posed by natural disaster and the combined profits of all illicit drug trade.

Given the gravity of the problem, and the poignant prognosis for the future, the extant scholarship on cyber risks is significantly limited. Recent studies have examined the drivers of investments in cybersecurity, with one observing that such investments depend on organisational capabilities, competencies, experience of previous attacks and the severity of those attacks (Fernandez De Arroyabe et al., 2023); and another study drawing attention to the positive influence of board gender diversity on corporate response to cyber risk, including the quality of cyber risk disclosures (Radu and Smaili, 2022). One paper explored the relationship between cyber risk disclosures and market response, especially in the wake of severe data breaches (Chen, Henry and Jiang, 2022). Other scholars have focused on specific sectors. In the healthcare sector, for example, scholars have observed gaps in organisational awareness and understanding of cyber risks and a lack of clarity on strategies required to improve resilience, in the wake of increasing digital transformation (Garcia-Perez et al., 2023). Other studies have explored the cybersecurity implications of national digital adoption systems (Hilowle et al., 2022); and the human and economic costs of cyber-attacks in industry control systems (Menze, 2020). In addition, scholars have considered the growing importance of cloud technologies and the concomitant security implications across a whole spectrum of industry sectors (Aldasoro et al., 2022).

However, there remains significant gaps in understanding the damaging impacts of cyberattacks and cyber threats, particular from an overarching, holistic perspective of value destruction (Alexander & Vallstrom, 2023; Echeverri & Skålén, 2021). Such focused understanding can better inform organisational decision making and strategies to effectively combat cyber threats. Furthermore, there are empirical gaps in knowledge of effectiveness of cyber risk quantification and cybersecurity systems across private and public sector organisations; innovative strategies employed by small and medium scale organisations to avert cyberattacks and mitigate value destruction, and the nuances that shape organisational strategies in different sectors and across geographical boundaries and institutional contexts (Cui & Osborne, 2023). There are also new scholarly inquiries and practitioner debates about policies banning payment of ransom to cyber attackers (Meurs et al, 2023a, 2023b), and the merits of cyber insurance as a strategic tool for value preservation.

Previous Special Issues in Information Systems Frontiers have also contributed significant to ever growing scholarship on cybersecurity. This Special Issue therefore aims to advance the discourse in cybersecurity research, building on the SI volume led by Xu et al. (2021) and Samtani et al. (2023). It will explore the necessity of a scientifically rigorous foundation for cybersecurity, reflecting on the field's complexity and advocating for a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach to developing innovative strategies and solutions. In addition, this Special Issue will build on Hota et al. (2015) by examining Big Data's transformative role and the critical need for improved Knowledge Management Systems amid rising security threats, especially in the public sector. It will highlight and explore forward-looking models to leverage Big Data effectively while ensuring robust security. While other ISF call for papers (CFPs) focus on human behaviour and psychological aspects in relation to cyber risks, as well as frontier technological solutions (machine learning and AI) this CFP focuses on organisational response, both public and private, within the context of value destruction.

In summary, this special issue seeks to be a visionary addition to existing scholarship, inspiring new research and fostering collaboration to navigate the future of cybersecurity, focusing on the intersection of security, privacy, trust, and ethics, and addressing complex challenges with 3 proactive and innovative solutions at the organisational level. Therefore, to address the gaps in knowledge, we invite conceptual and empirical contributions that address any of the following indicative, but not exhaustive topics:

• Comparative analysis of cybersecurity practices and strategies in public and private sector organisations
• Effectiveness of cyber risk quantification
• Cyber risk insurance as a strategic tool for value preservation
• Business model innovations for cyber risk mitigation
• Cyber risk awareness and mitigation measures across geographical and institutional contexts
• The economic, legal and operational impacts of banning ransom payments to cyber attackers
• Big data and secure Knowledge Management Systems in public and private sector organisations
• Generative modelling, Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) and cyber risk mitigation
• Legacy infrastructures and cyber risk vulnerabilities
• Remote working and organisational cyber risks
• Cyberattacks and value destruction in the manufacturing sector
• Cybersecure healthcare service systems
• Cybercrime and destructive entrepreneurship
• Digital sovereignty and cybersecurity
• Cybersecure digital adoption for small and medium scale enterprises

Special Issue Events

Pre-submissions manuscript development workshops

Individuals and groups of researchers interested in submitting their papers to the Special Issue are invited to submit extended abstracts of their proposed manuscripts. Along with this, potential contributors will also be invited to submit a simple poster presentation that summarise their proposed manuscript. The manuscript development workshops will be run in collaboration with British Academy of Management (BAM) and Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE). They will also be promoted on other platforms such as Research Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security RISCS) and Research Institute in Trustworthy Inter-connected Cyber-Physical Systems (RITICS). During the workshops, contributors will have the opportunity for peer review of their proposed manuscripts and feedback from the SI editors. While this provides no guarantees for publication, it offers an excellent opportunity for the researchers to enhance the quality of paper ahead of submission to the Special Issue.

Post-submission workshops

For authors who have received revise and resubmit decisions (R&R) for their manuscript, the guest editors will run post-submission feedback workshops, one of which will be at the ISBE annual conference in November 2024, and another at later date and venue to be announced. Again, participation at the workshop is voluntary and not a requirement or guarantee for acceptance of manuscripts.

Submission Instructions

Manuscripts must be submitted in word or latex format to the ISF-Springer online submission system at http://www.editorialmanager.com/isfi/. Paper submissions must conform to the format and submission guidelines of Information Systems Frontiers, which is available at http://www.springer.com/business/business+information+systems/journal/10796. Submissions should be approximately up to 32 pages double spaced including references.

About Information Systems Frontiers

Information Systems Frontiers (ISF) is a high-ranking, international scholarly journal designed to bridge the contributing academic disciplines and provide a link between academia and industry. The central objective of ISF is to publish original, well-written, self-contained contributions that elucidate novel research and innovation in IS/IT which advance the field fundamentally and significantly. In ABDC Ranking, it is listed as an A ranked journal. In ABS ranking, it is listed as a 3 level journal. In Web of Science, it has an impact factor of 5.9 (2022). ISF is Abstracted/Indexed in ABI inform, CompuMath Citation Index, Computer Literature Index, Current Contents/Engineering, Computing and Technology, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (ISTA), Inspec, ISI Alerting Services, ISI Web of Science, Risk Abstracts, Science Citation Index Expanded, SCOPUS, Zentralblatt Math.

Important Dates

Prospective authors should also take note of the following key dates:

• Submission of extended abstracts to guest editors: 31st May 2024
• Pre-submission workshops: dates to be announced between June and July 2024
• Full paper submission closes: 14th October 2024
• Peer review and feedback to authors: August 2024 to November 2024
• Post-submission workshops: Dates to be announced in November 2024 and March 2025
• Expected publication date: Summer of 2025

Special Issue on The Changing Nature of Creativity in the Era of Generative Artifical Intelligence (GenAI)
Submission Date: 2025-04-30

Despite the rich and cross-disciplinary literature on creativity at the individual, team, and organizational level, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and more recently, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) puts into question the relevance of existing knowledge in this area. Contrary to traditional AI, GenAI has the ability to produce novel content, including audio, images, text, and videos. Our proposed Special Issue (SI) seeks to build on an emerging interest with implications both within and beyond the Information Systems (IS) community, by exploring how these recent developments especially around GenAI influence creativity in organizations. Is GenAI a threat to human and organizational creativity? Does GenAI “compete” with humans, or could it complement human creativity and what is the role of organizations and managers in this era? These are only some of the questions we aim to shed light on with our SI in our effort to develop new understandings around creativity and GenAI.

Creativity is a topic of cross-disciplinary importance (e.g., psychology, engineering, arts, management), traditionally associated with the production of ideas that are both novel and useful (e.g., Amabile 1998). There exist different models to study creativity in different literatures; for example, in the field of marketing, the most popular models used is the 4Ps of creativity, which sees creativity as associated with the person, the product, the process, or the press of the environment (Richards 1999). In management and organizational studies, creativity has been studied at three levels: the individual (arguing that individuals can be creative due to personal characteristics and cognitive abilities); the team (presenting factors such as team composition and leadership that may influence creativity at the team level); and the organization (discussing the role of organizational culture and climate) (Amabile 1998; Andriopoulos 2001; Woodman et al. 1993). As technology evolved and influenced how individuals work in organizations, scholars developed an interest in how technology may influence the development of creativity. We thus saw a new stream of creativity research, this time in the context of virtual teams whose members are geographically (often globally) dispersed and communicate and collaborate using a range of different technologies. This literature has examined whether individuals can still be creative when they cannot work with their teams face-to-face and contributed an understanding of the varied role played by digital technologies and suitable management practices that could enable and support creativity in these contexts (Chamakiotis et al. 2013; Chamakiotis and Panteli 2023; Nemiro 2007; Ocker 2005).

Throughout the years, there has been consensus that creativity is what sets us (humans) apart from technological artifacts (computers). In other words, human creativity has been seen as something that cannot be replaced by computers. As a result, existing literature on creativity has sought to explore how digital technologies may influence human creativity and how leadership and management can be practiced so as to have a positive impact on human creativity (e.g., Chamakiotis and Panteli 2017). Nonetheless, we are now in an era of unprecedented technological developments, witnessing how GenAI may be better than humans in a number of ways, including creativity, through the generation of original content (Kshetri et al. 2023). As Marr (2023) puts it in a recent Forbes article, “[tools] like ChatGPT and Dall-E give the appearance of being able to carry out creative tasks — such as writing a poem or painting a picture — in a way that’s often indistinguishable from what we can do ourselves”. Further, although creativity has traditionally been seen and studied as something positive, the emergence of GenAI has revealed negative facets of creativity, with tech companies acknowledging algorithmic problems that may promote discrimination (Small 2023). For example, Google’s Gemini was seen to creatively produce images of a female pope as well as racially diverse Nazis (Field 2024); and to advise users to add glue onto their pizza and to eat rocks (McMahon and Kleinman 2024), thus distorting common cultural understandings and tangible historical facts, and putting users’ health in danger. Therefore, further to promoting ideas that might be “new and novel,” benefitting organizations and society, GenAI-enabled creativity is likely to have negative consequences, including enhancing discrimination, spreading misinformation, and endangering individuals.

Consequently, GenAI constitutes an emblematic illustration of how IS may in fact influence the world in truly unprecedented (positive or negative) ways. In this SI we are interested in how GenAI may influence creativity in particular. Despite a recognized interest in both topics (GenAI and creativity), in this SI we aim to bring the two concepts together and develop an understanding of the possibilities of GenAI-enabled creativity, the dangers, and the practices that may be required to manage GenAI-enabled creativity in the spirit of using IS and GenAI responsibly (Dennehy et al. 2023; Sivarajah et al. 2023; Trocin et al. 2023) and for the common good (Davison et al. 2023).

Though there is a recognition of the creative side of GenAI and specifically what is known as “analytical creativity” (Ming et al. 2024), there remains a need to explore the relationship between GenAI creativity and its effect on human, team and organizational creativity, as well as the creative potential of GenAI in a range of industries, sectors, and situations — e.g., in the creative industries (Piskopani et al. 2023), in education (Chen et al. 2023), in health (Sivarajah et al. 2023), and in emergency situations (Piccialli et al. 2021) — and its wider impacts in terms of scope and sustainability of these industries. With our SI, we hope to be able to provide fresh research that addresses some of these areas and which could be of value to academics, practitioners and policy makers.

Topics of submission include, but are not limited to:

• How GenAI systems influence human creativity.
•The reconfiguration of leadership practices in the era of GenAI.
•The role of leadership/management in enhancing human creativity in the era of GenAI.
•What GenAI creativity looks like and the opportunities it can provide.
•The kind of professions that may need to be adapted in the era of GenAI.
•Organizations’ role in ensuring human creativity.
•The effects of GenAI on team and/or organizational creativity.
•Facilitating/hindering factors in the use of GenAI for human creativity.
•The intersection between human and organizational creativity in the era of GenAI.
• The role of GenAI developers in promoting creativity.
•Ethical issues in developing GenAI for creativity in organizations.
•Impact of GenAI on creativity within IS education.
•How GenAI enables specific types of professionals (e.g., content creators, educators) to become more creative.
•How professionals across different sectors may be able to work alongside GenAI in order to promote creativity.
•The effect of GenAI on the creative industries, including how it values or devalues art.
•How can human creativity in particular be safeguarded and regulated to avoid unethical use and copyright infringement.

Submission Instructions

Manuscripts must be submitted in PDF format to the ISF-Springer online submission system at https://www.editorialmanager.com/isfi and the authors need to select "Special Issue: The Changing Nature of Creativity in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)" during the submission process. Paper submissions must conform to the format guidelines of Information Systems Frontiers https://www.springer.com/journal/10796/submission-guidelines. Submissions should be approximately 32 pages double spaced including references. Prospective authors are encouraged to submit a 1,000-word abstract for evaluation and feedback by email to the lead guest editor), although this is not a mandatory step. Unsuitable papers will be rejected within fifeteen days from submission. Authors are encouraged to submit before the paper submission deadline if their work is ready for submission. Authors of selected abstract submissions will be invited to a Paper Developmental Workshop (PDW) which will take place online in November 2024. The criteria for selection will be: (a) fit with the SI aims; (b) theoretical framing of the study (both conceptual and empirical papers are welcome); and (c) completion/maturity level of the proposed study (i.e., research-in-progress papers will not be considered). Authors not selected to attend the PDW may still submit their work if they consider it addresses the aims of the SI. Finally, selected authors may be asked to review other papers during the review process.

Important dates

•Abstract submission to PDW (optional by email to the lead guest editor): 30th September 2024
•PDW: November 2024
•Submission deadline: 30th April 2025
•Notification of first-round reviews: 31st July 2025
•Revised Manuscript due: 31st October 2025
•Notification of second-round reviews: 31st January 2026
•Final version due: 31st March 2026
•Expected final decision: 30th April 2026