NSS Workshop „Weaving the Global Networked Service Society“ @ the 21st Australasian Conference on Information Systems
published on Thursday, December 2nd 2010

The Networked Service Society (NSS) project team has organized and conducted the Workshop “Weaving the Global Networked Service Society”, which was held in the course of the 21st Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS) in Brisbane, Australia. The ERCIS network was represented at the workshop by Prof. Dr. Michael Rosemann (QUT, Brisbane), Prof. Bob McQueen, PhD (University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand), Prof. Dr. Michael zur Mühlen (Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, USA), Prof. Dr. Karlheinz Kautz (Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark), Dr. Armin Stein, Dr. Daniel Beverungen, and Martin Matzner (all University of Münster, Germany). In addition, the workshop attracted 16 external service researchers, representing the Smart Services CRC in Australia, as well as the Universities of Wollongong, Melbourne, Frankfurt, and Mannheim, as well as Aalto School of Economics.

In an Improved Nominal Group Technique (INGT) approach, a prioritized research agenda for investigating the role of Information Systems (IS) in the networked service society was derived. The analysis was initially framed by the NSS headwords of professionalization, digitalization, and sustainability. Workshop participants were asked to supply their research ideas with reference to one of three categories each, in an anonymous round-robin fashion. Afterwards, the research ideas were clustered to identify overarching research topics, that if answered could significantly improve our understanding and future design of the networked service society. Finally, the participants were asked to list their five favorite research questions for each of the three categories. This was done to prioritize the ideas generated in the form of a research agenda. The workshop was concluded by a discussion to explore additional advancements to be made in international service network research.

The results of the workshop indicate that the topics of ”How can the productivity of services be measured?“ (Professionalization), “Interaction/Collaboration in Services Development” (Digitalization), and “How is sustainability defined in the service world?” (Sustainability) were perceived by the workshop participants as the prime research goals. Some of the research questions identified in the workshop will be addressed in the NSS project during the next couple of months.