Relevant dates
Submissions due: 20 March 2022 April 3 2022 (new date)
Acceptance decisions: 30 April 2022
Workshop date: June 20, 2022 (full-day)
Workshop Organizers
Pär J. Ågerfalk, Uppsala University, Sweden
Roman Lukyanenko, HEC Montréal, Canada
Jan Recker, University of Hamburg, Germany
Workshop Background and Goals
Conceptual modelling emerged during the early years of the information systems (IS) discipline. Ever since, it has stood as a core theme of IS scholarship, providing an essential constellation of methods, tools, and theories to understand and support IS development. Although significant progress has been made over the years (Wand & Weber, 2017), conceptual modelling is still widely associated with “traditional” systems, such as enterprise systems, and with separation between technology and social actors (Boell and Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2015). In this traditional view, information systems are seen as representations of an external domain or universe of discourse, which are used to inform users about the state of the “real world” outside the system (Recker et al., 2019).
Recently, IS scholars have raised concerns about the applicability of conceptual modelling in the contemporary environment where activities are often performed online and where our experiences are increasingly mediated through digital technology. This new environment has been conceptualised as a “digital first” era, in which our world is increasingly shaped by what happens in digital domains rather than the other way around. Digital first calls for an “ontological reversal” (Baskerville et al., 2020) and a rethinking of the nature of the relationships between the digital, the material, and the social (Zammuto et al., 2007; Yoo et al., 2010; Aakhus et al., 2014; Cecez-Kecmanovic et al., 2014; Eriksson & Ågerfalk, 2021).
IS research has started to examine the profound changes that a digital first era brings. Still, their implications for conceptual modelling research and practice have not yet received the same attention (Recker et al., 2021). For example, digital practices rely on “institutional facts” (Searle, 2006) established through digital technology (Ågerfalk, 2010; Iannacci, 2010; March
& Allen, 2014; Eriksson & Ågerfalk, 2021). These practices emerge not only through human intervention and action but also, and increasingly, by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and autonomous technologies (Berente et al., 2021), typically driven by big data analytics (Ågerfalk, 2020). The emergence of these practices spawns fundamental questions about conceptual modelling, including:
- How can conceptual modelling be used to understand and shape this new and emerging context?
- How can conceptual models be used to reason, analyse, or design such practices?
- Does conceptual modelling have a role to play in understanding the broader societal implications of digitalisation?
- To what extent does conceptual modelling scholarship itself need to change to adapt to and account for the ontological reversal in the digital first era?
Call for Participation
Our workshop aims to bring together academic thought-leaders to exchange ideas and potential answers to these questions. Our goal is to bring together the many different areas and perspectives of conceptual modelling scholarship and work together towards a relevant research agenda for the future of conceptual modelling that continues its existing cumulative tradition and accounts for changes in reality and the role that digital systems play within our experiences.
To that end, we invite participants to submit position papers of no more than five pages length (template available here: SIGSAND/PRAG 2022 Template) that describe their ideas and potential answer to the broad question about the role and relevance of conceptual modeling in our contemporary “digital” environment. Position papers will be reviewed by the workshop organizers and shared with other participants. Please submit your position papers to par.agerfalk@im.uu.se by the deadline specified above. Reviews of position papers will follow a single blind peer review process.
During the workshop, we will have a mix of presentations on different positions together with roundtable discussions.
The desired outcome is a joint paper detailing the results and research agenda (targeted for an information systems journal). The co-chairs will invite all participants to contribute. The chairs will also aim to recommend accepted papers to relevant journals and help authors contact editors if needed.
References
Aakhus, M., Ågerfalk, P. J., Lyytinen, K., & Te’eni, D. (2014). Symbolic action research in information systems: Introduction to the special issue. MIS Quarterly, 38(4), 1187–1200.
Ågerfalk, P. (2010). Getting Pragmatic. European Journal of Information Systems, 19(3), 251-256.
Ågerfalk, P. J. (2020). Artificial intelligence as digital agency. European Journal of Information Systems, 29(1), 1–8.
Baskerville, R. L., Myers, M. D., & Yoo, Y. (2020). Digital first: The ontological reversal and new challenges for information systems research. MIS Quarterly, 44(2), 509–523.
Berente, N., Gu, B., Recker, J., & Santhanam, R. (2021). Managing Artificial Intelligence. MIS Quarterly, 45(3), 1433-1450.
Boell, S. K., & Cecez-Kecmanovic, D. (2015). What is an information system? In 48th Hawaii international conference on system sciences (HICSS), ieeexplore.ieee.org, pp. 4959–4968.
Cecez-Kecmanovic, D., Galliers, R. D., Henfridsson, O., Newell, S., & Vidgen, R. (2014). The sociomateriality of information systems. MIS Quarterly, 38(3), 809-830.
Eriksson, O., & Ågerfalk, P. J. (2021). Speaking things into existence: ontological foundations of identity representation and management. Information Systems Journal, in press.
Iannacci, F. (2010). When is an information infrastructure? Investigating the emergence of public sector information infrastructures. European Journal of Information Systems, 19(1), 35–48.
March, S. T., & Allen, G. N. (2014). Toward a social ontology for conceptual modeling. Communications of the AIS, 34, 1347–1358.
Recker, J. C., Lukyanenko, R., Jabbari Sabegh, M., Samuel, B., & Castellanos, A. (2021). From representation to mediation: a new agenda for conceptual modeling research in a digital world. MIS Quarterly, 45(1), 269-300.
Recker, J., Indulska, M., Green, P., Burton-Jones, A., & Weber, R. (2019). Information Systems as Representations: A Review of the Theory and Evidence. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 20(6), 735-786.
Searle, J. R. (2006). Social ontology: Some basic principles. Anthropological Theory, 6(1), 12–29.
Wand, Y., & Weber, R. (2017). Thirty years later: Some reflections on ontological analysis in conceptual modeling. Journal of Database Management, 28(1), 1–17.
Yoo, Y., Henfridsson, O., & Lyytinen, K. (2010). The New Organizing Logic of Digital Innovation: An Agenda for Information Systems Research. Information Systems Research, 21(4), 724-735.
Zammuto, R. F., Griffith, T. L., Majchrzak, A., Dougherty, D. J., & Faraj, S. (2007). Information Technology and the Changing Fabric of Organization. Organization Science, 18(5), 749-762.
