Time for some changes to ICIS? Reflections on our highest-quality conference

Urquhart, C, Carte, T and Heinzl, A (2017) Time for some changes to ICIS? Reflections on our highest-quality conference. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 41. pp. 179-197. ISSN 1529-3181

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Abstract

© 2017 by the Association for Information Systems. In this commentary, we reflect on the program chair experience of ICIS 2015 to pass on some useful organizational memory for the IS community at large. We also reflect on volunteer effort required for a high-quality conference and the challenges of maintaining quality over a diverse and dispersed reviewing effort. We ask whether we can count on this volunteer effort in a changing higher education context where universities value volunteer effort or service less than promotion and tenure. We make several wide-ranging recommendations to preserve organizational memory and ensure the ongoing excellence of ICIS. Finally, we elaborate on some hard questions about whether the current conference model is fit for purpose and consider alternative models for our high-quality conference.