IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE INFORMATION SYSTEMS 2010

A new paradigm is sweeping the society, organisations and the business environment. In fact, society and business world alike are moving from its tangible bases to intangible ones based on knowledge and information systems (IS) to support its management, use and sharing. In this emerging paradigm, terms like information, communication, knowledge, and learning have acquired a critical relevance to the understanding of the nature of contemporary business. This led authors such as Drucker (1993) to state that “we are entering the knowledge society in which the basic economic resource… is knowledge”.

In fact, since the mid-1980s, there has been a sudden avalanche of a new kind of vocabulary. Corporations, which so far had been economic entities, are being described as ‘information-based organizations’, ‘learning organizations’, ‘knowledge-creating companies’ or knowledge intensive organisations. Instead of product-market strategies, the fashionable business discourse invokes core competencies, intangible assets, knowledge-based capabilities, intellectual capital, knowledge management etc. Consequently, in this 21st century of ours, terms such as intellectual capital, knowledge management, and knowledge mapping have increasingly become part of the corporate landscape.

However, none of this apparent revolution would be possible without the underlying technological support provided by IS. The IADIS Information Systems Conference (IS 2010) aims to provide a forum for the discussion of IS taking a socio-technological perspective. It aims to address the issues related to design, development and use of IS in organisations from a socio-technological perspective, as well as to discuss IS professional practice, research and teaching.