[AISWorld] HICSS 51 - Call for Participation - MIS Quarterly Executive Workshop on Optimizing Digital Workforce

[Bill Kettinger (wjkttngr)]

Call for Participation: HICSS 51 - MIS Quarterly Executive Workshop on Optimizing Digital Workforce

Description:

The digital workforce includes millions of knowledge workers and customers performing IT development work or co-creating digital products and services. In preparation for MIS Quarterly Executive’s Special Issue on Optimizing the Digital Workforce, we invite you to submit an abstract for presentation at this HICSS workshop on Optimizing the Digital Workforce. The purpose of the HICSS workshop and MIS Quarterly Executive’s December 2018 Special Issue is to explore the challenges and opportunities presented by this changing digital workforce. Whereas in the past, we debated definitions, skills, and composition of the IT Workforce , we now must consider a future inhabited by a diversely skilled, global, and often-virtual workforce, customer base, and society that is intertwined with mixed-reality, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and drones as co-workers.

The old challenges of recruiting, motivating, developing, and retaining skilled workers both inside and outside the formal IT function continue, but are shifting in their complexity. Human capital management in today’s organizations is challenged by evolving recruiting and digital talent metrics, dissimilar expectations of an increasingly multi-generational, multi-cultural labor force, continued gender inequality, social inclusion, and the aging out of knowledge workers in many economic sectors . By 2022, the baby boom cohort will be 58-75 years of age, with their participation in the civil labor force predicted to increase to over 25% 12.

The World Economic Forum has as one of their many focal areas “Shaping the Future of Education, Gender, and Work” 13. They ask, “How can talent be developed and deployed to ensure that more than 7 billion people can fulfill their potential?” Their 2017 report highlights three global challenges facing organizations and society in developing and deploying human capital:

1) Globalization and technology are accelerating job creation and destruction, with estimates that a third of skill sets required to perform jobs will be wholly new by 2020.

2) Education and training systems, having remained largely static for decades, are not keeping pace with these shifts… Some studies suggest that 65% of children entering primary school today will have jobs that do not yet exist and for which their education will fail to prepare them, exacerbating skills gaps and unemployment in the future workforce.

3) Outdated cultural norms and institutional inertia create roadblocks for half of the world’s talent. These factors together exacerbate income inequality and fuel political and social turmoil… According to the latest data, on average globally, women have less than two-thirds of the economic opportunity that men have, and the rate of progress is stalling, with current forecasts to economic parity at 170 years.

The WEF is not alone in highlighting the importance of developing and managing human capital in the twenty-first century. The 2016 report on IT leadership issues includes IT talent management as among their top ten4. PwC’s survey of 2,216 business and technology executives found that organizations with more comprehensive digital strategies achieved stronger financial performance 9. These digital strategies extend beyond managing technology development and execution to include managing relationships between employees, customers, and the digital environment they co-habit. In reporting on the perceived “Digital IQ” of surveyed firms, “82% of top-performing companies emphasize the human experience surrounding digital tech” 9. Beyond the user experience, the complex interaction of humans and digital artifacts requires attention to new skills and work relationships. From the bottom up, as employees and customers adopt emerging social media technologies and special purpose applications (referred to as IT consumerism), the resulting IT complexity, security, and privacy issues force organizations to reconsider new work routines, enterprise tools, and human capital development opportunities 4.

Our objective is to examine the strategic business opportunities and management challenges associated with managing a diverse and evolving digital workforce. MIS Quarterly Executive bridges practice and research and is sponsored by the Society for Information Management and the Association for Information Systems. We are looking for the submission of abstracts based on case and/or field studies that provide rich illustrations, frameworks, or lessons to guide management in successful strategies for managing this increasingly diverse, digital workforce. We welcome submissions based on both primary and secondary sources. This Special workshop seeks presentations of both original research and rigorous research published in traditional venues that have practical lessons learned for management.
Digital workforce topics may include all aspects of digital workforce management, including recruiting, developing, retaining, motivating, or compensating. It may include, but is not limited to:

·      Workforce diversity, including multi-cultural and multi-generational strategies

·      New digital talent metrics and talent analytics

·      Remote workers and the virtual workforce, including crowd-sourcing and managing virtual “crowd workers”

·      Offshoring and shifting skill composition and relationships with a global workforce

·      Work displacement, destruction, and creation

·      How firms are flexing to manage an aging workforce and skill drain

·      AI, robotics, mixed-reality and machine-human adaptation for productivity and job satisfaction

·      Increasing the firm’s “Digital IQ” (REF PwC) through managing user experience of customers, employees, and culture

Workshop Deadlines:

·      Sept. 1, 2017: Submit an abstract of no more than 2 single-spaced pages of text and up to 2 figures. We will not count figures and references in the 2-page limit.

·      Oct. 13, 2017: Notification of workshop acceptance with preliminary editorial feedback

Please direct questions to Michelle L. Kaarst-Brown, Syracuse University, at mlbrow03 at syr.edu
Workshop Leaders: Michelle Kaarst-Brown, Bill Kettinger, and Dorothy Leidner
References

1.     BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (2015) Computer and Information Technology Occupations. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Published Thursday, December 17, 2015 Accessed Feb 28, 2017 at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/home.htm

2.     Bersin, J., Houston, J., & Kester, B. (2014) Talent analytics in practice: Go from talking to delivering on big data. Deloitte Human Capital Trends Report 2014. Deloitte University Press. Accessed Feb 28, 2017 at https://dupress.deloitte.com/dup-us-en/focus/human-capital-trends/2014/hc-trends-2014-talent-analytics.html?id=gx:el:dc:dup684:cons:awa:hct14

3.     Deng, X. & Joshi, K. D. (2016). Why individuals participate in micro-task crowdsourcing work environment: Revealing crowdworkers' perceptions. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 17(10), 648-673.

4.     Harris, J., Ives, B. & Junglas, I. (2012) IT Consumerization: When Gadgets Turn Into Enterprise IT Tools. MIS Quarterly Executive, Sept. 11(3).

5.     Kappleman, L., Johnson, V., Maurer, C., McLean, E., Torres, R., & Nguyen, Q. (2016) Guest Editorial: A Preview of the 2016 SIM IT Trends Study. MIS Quarterly Executive, Dec, 15(4).

6.     Kaarst-Brown, M.L. & Guzman, I. (2005) “Who is the IT Workforce?: Challenges Facing Policy Makers, Management, and Research”. Proceedings of ACM SIGMIS CPR - Computer Personnel Research Conference, 1-8. Atlanta, GA.

7.     Lacity, M. & Willcocks, L. (2016) Robotic Process Automation at Telefónica O2. MIS Quarterly Executive, March, 15(1).

8.     Merisotis, J. (2016). Appreciating a multigenerational higher education IT workforce. EDUCAUSE Review, 51(3), 39.

9.     PwC, (2017) Global Digital IQ® Accessed Feb. 16, 2017 at http://www.pwc.com/us/en/advisory-services/digital-iq.html?icid=pwcus_home-new_hero_Advisory_Digital-IQ

10. Su, N., Levina, N., & Ross, J. W. (2016) The long-tail strategy of IT outsourcing. MIT Sloan Management Review, 57(2), 81-89.

11. Tripp, J. F., Riemenschneider, C., & Thatcher, J. B. (2016). Job satisfaction in agile development teams: Agile development as work redesign. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 17(4), 267-307.

12. Toosi, Mitra (2013) Labor force projections to 2022: the labor force participation rate continues to fall. Monthly Labor Review. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. December. Accessed Feb 28, 2017 at https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/labor-force-projections-to-2022-the-labor-force-participation-rate-continues-to-fall.htm

13. WEF (2017) Realizing Human Potential in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Report from World Economic Forum. Accessed Feb 28, 2017 at https://www.weforum.org/whitepapers/realizing-human-potential-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution

14. Weitzel, T., Eckhardt, A., and Laumer, S. (2009) A Framework for Recruiting IT Talent: Lessons from Siemens. MIS Quarterly Executive, Dec. 8(4), 175-189.