[AISWorld] Call for Papers (reminder): Information Systems Research (ISR) Special Issue on Ubiquitous IT and Digital Vulnerabilities

Fri Feb 13 12:07:42 EST 2015

Call for Papers: ISR Special Issue on Ubiquitous IT and Digital 
Vulnerabilities (http://pubsonline.informs.org/page/isre/calls-for-papers)

Special Issue Editors:

     Rob Fichman (fichman at bc.edu <mailto:fichman at bc.edu>)
     Ram Gopal (ram.gopal at business.uconn.edu 
<mailto:ram.gopal at business.uconn.edu>)
     Alok Gupta (alok at umn.edu <mailto:alok at umn.edu>)
     Sam Ransbotham (sam.ransbotham at bc.edu <mailto:sam.ransbotham at bc.edu>)

Submission Deadline: 1 March 2015

“The myriad connections forged by […] technologies have brought 
tremendous benefits to everyone who uses the web to tap into humanity’s 
collective store of knowledge every day. But there is a darker side to 
this extraordinary invention.” (Economist 2014)

IDEA IN BRIEF

It is incontrovertible that IT permeates every aspect of organizational, 
social, and economic activity. The ubiquity of information technology 
has profoundly changed society—usually for the better but sometimes for 
the worse. This special issue seeks to counterbalance the focus on the 
positive aspects and outcomes of pervasive digitization by stimulating 
research on vulnerabilities introduced or exacerbated by new (and old) 
forms of IT. Our goal is to develop and promote novel ideas for 
preserving or strengthening the potential benefits of pervasive IT while 
mitigating potential drawbacks. Hence, the focus will be not just on 
identifying vulnerabilities, but, rather, on the development of new 
managerial wisdom for better managing organizations, societies, and our 
personal lives in light of these vulnerabilities.

DETAILS

Modern society is rapidly developing and diffusing previously 
unimaginable information technologies. Systems that collect information 
now permeate all areas of society and range from widely used Internet 
applications to personal technologies to distributed embedded devices. 
These systems now routinely retain structured and unstructured data in 
hitherto unprecedented quantities. Google, for example, estimates that 
its data store performs four trillion read/write transactions per month. 
Detailed data collection is now pervasive, both by individuals (e.g., 
the quantified self movement, Economist 2012) and by others (e.g., 
online activity, Geary 2012), and leads to unresolved questions about 
the nature of digital vulnerabilities. As tools and techniques swiftly 
evolve to process this information and use it in new ways, the 
opportunities and challenges associated with information are 
fundamentally changing. Privacy and security are clearly important, but 
much remains to be understood about many issues such as ethics, 
responsible use, algorithmic accountability, discrimination, 
de-anonymization, and policy implications.

A wealth of prior research sheds light on many ways that organizations 
can use systems to gather, organize, select, synthesize, and distribute 
information across all areas of the value chain including operations, 
logistics, production, marketing, design, service, and infrastructure. 
Emerging applications of IT provide significant opportunities for 
advantage. However, emerging technologies also frequently have the 
potential for unintended consequences or may create one problem even as 
they solve another (Overby et al. 2010). For example, the Centers for 
Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently made public for the first 
time how much Medicare pays individual doctors and other providers, and 
this marked a major milestone in healthcare transparency (Blum 2014); 
however, it has also sparked concerns that individual physicians may be 
incorrectly targeted and publicly shamed (e.g., Salzberg 2014, Weaver et 
al. 2014). Furthermore, while pioneering uses of information continue to 
emerge, many aspects of IT have become commodities that do not confer 
advantage but are instead required and necessary for minimal 
organizational operation. Unfortunately, these pervasive uses of and 
dependencies on IT may also introduce vulnerabilities for individuals 
and organizations. To illustrate, the scale of a national system to 
facilitate health insurance markets necessitates IT infrastructure. Yet 
difficulties with the launch of the United States healthcare.gov site 
caused significant loss of time, political and reputational damage, and 
direct expense (BBC News 2013). Additionally, emerging or commodity uses 
of IT may differentially affect societal subgroups along social or 
economic strata with concomitant policy implications (Mitra and 
Ransbotham 2012). Overall, vulnerabilities have received considerably 
less attention from researchers than benefits but are critical to the 
continued successful use of IT.

How can we maximize benefits and create value from advances in IT while 
minimizing drawbacks? This special issue takes a broad view of 
vulnerability and calls for novel, data-focused approaches to identify 
sources of vulnerability, to understand their underlying mechanisms, and 
to mitigate their effects. Submissions at any level of analysis are 
welcome but should be grounded in data (including field and lab 
experiments, archival data, primary data collection). Topics of interest 
include but are not limited to vulnerabilities (and associated tensions) 
related to the following:

- Liability, electronic discovery, and legal implications of new forms 
of data tracking and retention
- Widespread public exposure of confidential or unflattering 
organizational or individual information (e.g., through social media or 
search)
- Intellectual property issues (copying, reverse engineering, theft, 
espionage) in a globally connected society
- Catastrophic operational disruptions arising from system failures
- Dissemination of information with dangerous applications (e.g., 
related to terrorism, crime, risky personal behavior)
- Tensions in transparency of information (e.g., health, financial, or 
operational)
- Privacy and personal data disclosure
- Ethical uses of information
- Management and implications of emerging payment systems and currencies
- Pervasive use of surveillance that may both secure and subjugate
- Cyber stalking, bullying, and harassment
- Information technology used for fraud and deception
- Future directions in vulnerability research
- Domain-specific issues (e.g., marketing, law, health, education)

PROJECTED TIMELINE

     January 4, 2015    Early reactions to paper ideas (optional)
     March 1, 2015    Submissions due
     June 2015    First round of editorial decisions
     September 2015    Special issue workshop at Boston College
     January 10, 2016    Revisions due
     March 2016    Second round of editorial decisions
     May 8, 2016    Final revisions due
     June 2016    Final editorial decisions
     Sept/Dec 2016    Publication

EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD

     Ahmed Abbasi (Virginia)
     Alessandro Acquisti (CMU)
     Terrence August (UCSD)
     France Belanger (Virginia Tech)
     Huseyin Cavusoglu (UT Dallas)
     Ram Chellappa (Emory)
     Elizabeth Davidson (Hawaii)
     Debabrata Dey (Washington)
     Kai Lung Hui (HKUST)
     Eric Johnson (Vanderbilt)
     Karthik Kannan (Purdue)
     Paul Lowry (Hong Kong)
     James Marsden (Connecticut)
     Sabyasachi Mitra (Georgia Tech)
     Vijay Mookerjee (UT Dallas)
     Tyler Moore (SMU)
     Eric Overby (Georgia Tech)
     Rema Padman (CMU)
     Srinivasan Raghunathan (UT Dallas)
     Sasha Romanosky (RAND)
     Matti Rossi (Aalto)
     Larry Sanders (SUNY - Buffalo)
     Raghu Santanam (Arizona State)
     Ulrike Schultze (SMU)
     Olivia Sheng (Utah)
     Param Singh (CMU)
     Mikko Siponen (Jyväskylä)
     Carsten Sørensen (LSE)
     Catherine Tucker (MIT)
     Merrill Warkentin (Mississippi State)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

     BBC News (2013) Obama addresses healthcare website glitches. 
October 21, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24613022.
     Blum J, (2014) Next steps in Medicare data transparency. Centers 
for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 
http://blog.cms.gov/2014/04/02/next-steps-in-medicare-data-transparency/.
     The Economist (2012) Counting every moment. The Economist, March 3, 
http://www.economist.com/node/21548493.
     The Economist (2014) Defending the digital frontier. The Economist, 
July 12, 
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/07/special-report-cyber-security. 

     Geary J (2012) Tracking the trackers: What are cookies? An 
introduction to web tracking. The Guardian, April 23.
     Mitra S, Ransbotham S (2012) The effects of vulnerability 
disclosure policy on the diffusion of security attacks. Proc. Internat. 
Conf. on Inform. Systems.
     Overby E, Slaughter S, Konsynski B (2010) The design, use, and 
consequences of virtual processes. Inform. Systems Res. 21(4):700-710.
     Salzberg S (2014) New Medicare data reveal startling $496 million 
wasted On chiropractors. Forbes, April 20.
     Weaver C, Beck M, Winslow R (2014) Doctor-pay trove shows limits of 
Medicare billing data. Wall Street Journal, April 9.

-- 
Sam Ransbotham
     Boston College
        Associate Professor of Information Systems
        sam.ransbotham at bc.edu

     MIT-Sloan Management Review
        Guest Editor, Data and Analytics
        ransboth at mit.edu

Twitter: @Ransbotham
http://www.SamRansbotham.com
MIT-SMR articles: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/?s=ransbotham
phone: 617-552-0465

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