Traditionally, organisations have concerned themselves only with specifying their own requirements for Information Systems and developing systems that meet those requirements. These activities have proven to be complex and problematic and have led to new approaches in systems development including software engineering methodologies and practices.

Increasingly, transforming forces such as globalisation, e-business and dynamically developing IT have critically increased the challenges and complexities of IT adoption and diffusion. Organisations may now be obliged to re-engineer legacy systems due to external imperatives, adopt incompatible external systems or deliver service levels across tightly integrated inter-organisational systems on multiple-technology platforms.

The implications for the adoption and diffusion of IT are a substantial increase in complexity at planning, requirements definition, design, development and implementation stages. Pressures to conform to external requirements may result in a period of externally-imposed radical change to current practice. Operationally, inter-organisational systems represent a completely new set of challenges for both technical and business staff.

The Conference theme acknowledges the shift required in IS adoption paradigms for both researchers and practitioners. Practitioners will need to revise their practices to cope with the new realities. Researchers need to review, revise and extend existing models that have been based on intra-organisational systems.

The proposed format is to open the conference with a plenary session on Thursday 1^st August at 9:00 hours. The conference would then break into three streams - one of panels and two of research paper presentations. There will be closing session to discuss emerging themes for the research as well as working group business. The conference dinner will be on the Friday evening.

Conference Location

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Call for Contribution

Due date: 16^th January, 2002.

This theme is seen to be significant to researchers with a wide range of interests from strategic planning through systems engineering to implementation and evaluation. Two streams of papers are proposed:

1. Management issues. To include management aspects of adoption and diffusion within and across organisations at strategic, tactical, operational levels in planning, development and implementation.
2. Technical issues. To include technical and software engineering aspects of adoption and diffusion within and across organisations.

In addition, a panel stream is proposed to generate active discussion on key issues related to the conference theme. We particularly encourage proposals for panel discussions that consider industry-relevant adoption and diffusion issues from practitioner and researcher perspectives and panels that consider the relevance and applicability of existing theory in this new environment.The conference location, Sydney, Australia, hosted the 2000 Summer Olympic Games and is regarded as a major tourist destination with a unique international atmosphere as well as easy access to some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. For more information see http://www.sydney.com.au/

Submissions

We invite you to submit a paper or to propose a panel for this conference.

Submissions are invited on any issue relating and contributing to the conference theme and objectives. Research papers providing multi-disciplinary perspectives on the conference theme are welcome. Papers may also illustrate the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach as a result of a narrow research focus having been adopted. Submissions jointly authored and/or proposed by partnerships between researchers across disciplines are especially encouraged.

Research papers that deal with the challenges of a dynamic and rapidly changing research subject are very welcome. The program committee also welcomes frameworks that organize or highlight the area of study. Recognizing the diversity of research in this area, studies may be quantitative, qualitative, theoretical, conceptual or experiential. Position papers with perspectives related to the theme should be well argued with a clearly stated position.

Accepted papers will be available in a collection of preprints at the conference with formal proceedings being published after the event. This will allow the program committee to set the closing date for submissions much closer to the conference date itself than is normally the case.

Key Dates

Submission deadline:	Monday 16th January, 2002.
Notification of acceptance:	Monday 8th April, 2002.
Submission of final version:	Monday 5th June, 2002.

Submissions will be accepted only in an electronic form, in .rtf format through attached e-mail documents.

Conference attendees will be provided with pre-publication papers.Papers accepted and presented as well as summaries of the panels will be post-printed in the proceedings proposed to be published by Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Proceedings will be mailed to conference attendees.

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Conference Organisation

General Chair:	TBA
Program Chairs:	Deborah Bunker, UNSW, Australia David Wilson, UTS, Australia.
Organizing Chairs:	Steve Elliot, University of Newcastle, Australia. Ross Jeffery, UNSW, Austral23ia.
Panel Chair:	Steve Elliot, University of Newcastle, Australia
Industry Liaison:	Philip Macrea
Sponsors:	The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) TC8 And others TBA

Program Committe Members

Ivan Aaen	Aalborg University Denmark			Linda Levine	Carnegie Mellon University
Mark Ardis	Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology			Tom McMaster	University of Salford
Richard Baskerville	Georgia State University			Barbara Marcolin	University of Calgary
Gro Bjerknes				Mac Patrick	Process Advantage Technology
Jan Damsgaard	Copenhagen Business School			Jan Pries-Heje	Copenhagen Business School
Eileen Forrester	Carnegie Mellon University			Chris Sauer	Oxford University
Sharon Guenterberg	Logicon			Carsten Sorensen	London School of Economics
Karlheinz Kautz	Copenhagen Business School			Richard Vidgen	University of Bath
Tor Larsen	Norwegian School of Management			David Wastell	University of Salford

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Papers

Manuscripts must be original, unpublished elsewhere and between a minimum of 16 and a maximum of 24 pages long, double-spaced.

Manuscripts are accepted only in electronic form. Electronic submissions should be sent to Deborah Bunker at d.bunker@unsw.edu.au

All submissions should include a separate title page with the title of the paper and each author's full name, affiliation, complete address, telephone, fax and email. The body of the paper must contain the title and abstract, a list of keywords, the text and should not identify the author(s) in any manner. Once accepted, final papers must be submitted in IFIP/Kluwer camera ready format. This is not necessary for the reviewing draft but the task of final paper preparation will be easier if these requirements are borne in mind when preparing the reviewing draft. Guidelines (template) for formatting are available at http://www.wkap.com/ifip

All submissions will be refereed by at least two anonymous reviewers.

Papers accepted and presented as well as summaries of the panels will be post-printed in the proceedings proposed to be published by Kluwer. No changes may be made to papers after acceptance. One author must attend the conference. All participants will receive a copy of the final proceedings. Additional copies of the proceedings will be available for purchase.

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Panels

Panels are required to generate active discussion on key issues related to the conference theme. We particularly encourage proposals for panel discussions which consider innovative approaches to inter-disciplinary research issues or research approaches.

All panel proposals should include:

• a brief summary of the proposed panel topic, including a justification for the importance of the issue to be discussed

• the names, affiliations and full addresses of all panel members

• confirmation that the panel members have committed to participate if the panel is accepted

• a brief description of each member's background including his/her expertise relative to the panel topic

In view of the theme of the conference, it is important that panels be composed of members from a variety of disciplines and/or countries and cultures. We would also be very enthusiastic about panels which include practitioners as well as academics.

Please send an electronic copy of your panel proposal to Steve Elliot at selliot@mail.newcastle.edu.au Summaries of accepted panels will be included in the final proceedings.