Grand Societal Challenges in Information Systems Research and Education ― Ideas from the Ercis Virtual Seminar Series

This book examines how information systems research and education can play a major role in contributing to solutions to the Societal Grand Challenges formulated in “The Millennium Project” (millenium-project.org). Individual chapters focus on specific challenges, review existing approaches and contributions towards solutions in information systems research and outline a research agenda for these challenges. The topics considered in this volume range from climate change, population growth, global ICT availability, breakthroughs in science and technology and energy demand to ethical decision-making, policymaking, gender status and transnational crime prevention. It is the first book to present ideas on how the Information Systems discipline can contribute to the solution on this wide spectrum of grand societal challenges.

Professor Dr. Jan vom Brocke is the Hilti Chair of Business Process Management, Director of the Institute of Information Systems and Vice-President Research and Innovation of the University of Liechtenstein. He also serves as Vice-President of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), Vice President of the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB), and Director of the European Research Center (ERCIS) in Liechtenstein. Jan has published 23 books and over 300 academic articles, among others in Management Information Systems Quarterly (MISQ), Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS), and in Information & Management (I&M). He serves on the editorial review board of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS) and is an associate editor of Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE) and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application (JITTA). He has taught at a number of universities, including the University of Muenster (Germany), the University of St.Gallen (Switzerland), the LUISS University in Rome (Italy), the University of Turku (Finland), the University College Dublin (Ireland) and he is an active supporter of the AAU IS PhD program at the University of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia).

Dr. Armin Stein is Managing Director of the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) of the University of Munster. Together with his team, he shapes and puts into actions the ideas of the ERCIS networking. During his PhD studies at the Department for Information Systems, Armin's work was and still is related to Business Process Management with a focus on the conceptual modelling and workflow management, addressing the technical aspects of BPM. Other research interests are related to the areas of Supply Chain Management and Gender and Diversity in IS.

Sara Hofmann is Research Assistant and PhD Candidate at the Department of Information Systems at the University of Munster. She is particularly interested in the field of e-government, IT adoption, communication theories, and governments’ use of social media. Sara Hofmann has taken part in several research projects, funded by national and international funding organisations, especially related to the topics of e-government, service science and IT adoption.

Sanja Tumbas is a Research Assistant and PhD Candidate at the Institute of Information Systems, the Hilti Chair of Business Process Management at the University of Liechtenstein. Her PhD project focuses on innovation with digital technologies and dynamics between people and technology. Also, she has been involved in several EU funded projects concerned with the future of higher education.