Copyright Roger Clarke Xamax Consultancy, Canberra Visiting Professor in Computer Science, ANU and in Cyberspace Law & Policy, UNSW {.html,.ppt} Bled eConference – 18 June 2012 The First 25 Years of the Bled eConference Themes and Impacts

Copyright Why Analyse the Bled eConference? 1968HICSS 1978IS Research Seminar in Scandinavia (IRIS) 1980ICIS 1990Australasian Conference in IS (ACIS) 1993ECIS

Copyright Why Analyse the Bled eConference? 1968HICSS 1978IS Research Seminar in Scandinavia (IRIS) 1980ICIS 1990Australasian Conference in IS (ACIS) 1993ECIS All of those are generic IS conferences Bled is the longest-running thematic conference series in or associated with the IS discipline Its themes have historical and substantive significance

Copyright Origins of the Bled eConference Joze Gricar conceived and ran conferences on the topic of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) EDI: informally, the replacement of paper-based purchase orders with electronic equivalents more formally, the exchange of documents in standardised electronic form, between organisations, in an automated manner, directly from an application in one organisation to an application in another There were new opportunities and new challenges These needed to be investigated

Copyright The Early Bled eConferences The 1988, 1989 and 1990 conferences were mainly local – but local meant Yugoslavia as a whole 3 leading US academics were increasingly involved: Milt Jenkins (University of Baltimore) Doug Vogel (then University of Arizona, later City University of Hong Kong) Don McCubbrey (University of Denver) By 1991, many conference delegates were from outside Yugoslavia, incl. Europe, USA, Australia In 1995, a fully-refereed Research Stream emerged In 1999, the Outstanding Paper Award commenced

Copyright The Scope of the Bled Conferences Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) (5) EDI and Inter-Organizational Systems (3) ––– LANs mainstream, the Internet arrives ––– Electronic Commerce (9) eConference (8)

Copyright The Bled Conference Themes, post-EDI Bled Electronic Commerce Conference 1996 (09) – Electronic Commerce for Trade Efficiency and Effectiveness 1997 (10) – Global Business in Practice 1998 (11) – Electronic Commerce in the Information Society 1999 (12) – Global Networked Organisations 2000 (13) – Electronic Commerce: The End of the Beginning 2001 (14) – e-Everything: e-Commerce, e- Government, e-Household, e- Democracy 2002 (15) – eReality: Constructing the eEconomy 2003 (16) – eTransformation 2004 (17) – eGlobal Bled eConference 2005 (18) – eIntegration in Action 2006 (19) – eValues 2007 (20) – eMergence: Merging and Emerging Technologies, Processes, and Institutions 2008 (21) – eCollaboration: Overcoming Boundaries Through Multi-Channel Interaction 2009 (22) – eEnablement: Facilitating an Open, Effective and Representative eSociety 2010 (23) – eTrust: Implications for the Individual, Enterprises and Society 2011 (24) – eFuture: Solutions for the Individual, Organisations and Society 2012 (25) – eDependability

Copyright Conference and Research Stream Leadership Conference Chair – Joze Gricar (21), Andreja Pucihar (4) Consistency, continuity in flavour, style and values Research Stream Chair in a 2-Year Cycle – for Diversity and Adaptation to changes in the conference community's interests Over 18 years, 16 different individuals have performed the Research Stream Chair role – 9 male, 7 female Chairs affiliations in 9 different countries Europe (6) – Germany 5, Greece, the UK, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland – & the USA, Australia, Hong Kong

Copyright Papers and Authorship >1,000 papers, >2,000 authors Since 1995, 773 refereed papers, 1,800 authors 49 countries on the research program: Australia 389 (22%), Netherlands 260 (15%), Germany 234 (13%), UK 100, Finland 95, USA 71, Ireland 68, Greece 66, Switzerland 61,... On average, on each program: 17 countries (range 11 to 23) 55 universities (range 24 to 94) 9 authors not academics (range 2 to 19) 11 multiple-institutional authors (c. 25%) (4 to 21) 7 multiple-country authors (c. 15%) (1 to 13)

Copyright Authorship Of the 773 papers: Sole Author21% Dual-Authored42% Three Authors26% Four Authors 8% 5, 6 or 7 authors 3% (25 papers) From sole-authored papers (48%, down to 14%) Towards teams of 3 or more authors (12%, up to 48%)

Copyright Technologies as Themes at the Bled eConference? Mainframes, Minis, Micros PCs, Laptops Mobiles, Tablets PPNs and VANs LANs The Internet and VPNs Cellular Networks But Technology has never been the primary focus

Copyright Frequency of Words in Paper-Titles The most-frequent words in the titles within each 3-year set, omitting generic terms such as management, system and framework

Copyright Categorisation Process No existing set of categories was found that provides a basis for classifying the 773 papers Visual inspection identified 63 keywords, with 972 mentions, for an average of 1.25 keywords per paper The keywords were then clustered, informally, on the basis of the author's familiarity with the subject-matter and his particular world-view. No authoritative basis for the clustering is claimed This gave 34 keyword-clusters within 3 major groups Categories of eBusiness60% Corporate Perspectives22% Research Topics19%

Copyright Categories of eBusiness (60%) EDI eCommerce (14%) eMarkets, Directories, Auctions SMEs MCommerce, Mobile Apps eMarketing, CRM, Consumer Behaviour eGovernment eHealth 2006, Other (8 clusters)108

Copyright Bled25 Special Section Categories of eBusiness eRegions HansDieter Zimmerman Mobile Commerce, Mobile Value Services Carlsson & Walden

Copyright Corporate Perspectives (22%) Inter-Organisational Systems Supply Chain, ECR, Intermediaries Business Models , BPR, Transformation, Alignment, Integration Strategic Alliance, Bus Networks, Virtual Organisations 2004, Other (4 clusters) 47

Copyright Bled25 Special Section Corporate Perspectives Tools to Support Business Models Bouwman et al. Project Management Julie Cameron IOIS and Information Infrastructure Klein at al. Procedural Controls to Facilitate Trade Bons et al.

Copyright Research Topics (19%) Adoption, Impediments, Success Factors Trust, Reputation, Risk , Other (7 clusters)96

Copyright Bled25 Special Section Research Topics User Acceptance Hans van der Heijden

Copyright Full-Text Analysis? not currently in machine-readable format which includes the first 3 refereed Procs, Searches by keyword-in-fulltext are feasible on the Bled eConference site, for in the AIS eLibrary, for Content analysis is highly resource-intensive Preliminary Experiments Smartphone gives – 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 2 – ?! Facebook gives – 1, 4, 4, 8, 12 – !?? An important Lit Search resource

Copyright The Special Case of Google Formed in 1998 and achieved dominance of the search- market in many countries by First mention in a Bled paper in 2004, then 58 times: – 2, 1, 11, 11, 9, 7, 5, 12 times The focal point in only 10 papers: 5 in 2006 (3 re search, 1 re copyright, 1 re privacy) 1 in 2007 (re the market for advertising) 1 in 2008 (re the market for advertising) 3 in 2011 (2 re cloud computing, 1 re copyright) Particular services are of interest to Bled authors only during a brief window, some time after the services have been launched and achieved market penetration

Copyright Towards Semi-Automated Meta-Analysis of the Bled Corpus Manual analysis is too resource-intensive, and too judgmental, unreliable, unrepeatable, etc. 'Automatic Semantic Trend Analysis' – Heinz Dreher Application of a semantic analysis tool to the full-text of each set of refereed proceedings , generating measures of the occurrence of ConceptKeywords, within-year, and across the period Enables detection and analysis of changing emphases, such as the patterns of references to people as users, participants, employees, team- members and objects

Copyright Impact Measures >1,000 Papers in hard-copy and CD Proceedings Papers in Journals – 53 papers (7%) in 13 Special Sections of IJEC, EM plus many more independently 550 Papers Online, Open Access at the Conference web-site, also in the AIS eLibrary Citations: Bled Papers Google citation-count > 3,500 Bled-Derived Special Issue Papers > 2,000 Downloads, from AIS eLibrary >10,000, plus conference web-site, uni and personal repositories Graduate Student Consortia, Student ePrototype Bazaars, Research Collaborations, informal exchange

Copyright Diversity of Scope, and of Units of Study Economic Perspective: Corporation / Government Agency Industry Segment / Sector Region Nation Bloc Human Perspective: Not-for-profit / NGO / Association Community / Segment Social Group Individual

Copyright Information Systems A Definition The multi-disciplinary study of: the collection, processing and storage of data the use of information by individuals and groups, especially within organisational contexts artefacts and technologies that are applied to those activities the impact, implications and management of those artefacts and technologies

Copyright The Dangers of Empiricism Empiricism says base interpretations on observations Empiricists have to wait for phenomena to stabilise before they can deliver any information of value So empiricism is inherently backwards-looking. Old-world research describes past realities

Copyright The Dangers of Empricism Empiricism = base interpretations on observations Empiricists have to wait for phenomena to stabilise before they can deliver any information of value So empiricism is inherently backwards-looking. Old-world research describes past realities The subject-matter of the Bled eConference is dynamic The style of the Bled eConference is instrumentalist To be design-oriented, authors have to take risks, and carefully balance academic rigour with relevance

Copyright The Bled eConference Outstanding Paper Award The Criteria Perspective The Quality Sought Real-World R elevance Contribution A mbition Academic R igour Presentation E ase of Access

Copyright Roger Clarke Xamax Consultancy, Canberra Visiting Professor in Computer Science, ANU and in Cyberspace Law & Policy, UNSW {.html,.ppt} Bled eConference – 18 June 2012 The First 25 Years of the Bled eConference Themes and Impacts