Track Co-Chairs
Fang Wang
Professor
fwang@wlu.ca
Lazaridis School of Business & Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University
Zhao Du
Professor
duzhao@bsu.edu.cn
Beijing Sport University
Shan Wang
Professor
wang@edwards.usask.ca
Edwards School of Business, University of Saskatchewan
Brief Introduction
This track welcomes research at the nexus of digital services and organizational/societal transformation. Digital services—created, delivered, or augmented through digital technologies—now underpin business models, public administration, and everyday social interaction. Enabled by data, networks, and automation, these services extend well beyond efficiency gains and reconfigure value creation, citizen engagement, and competitive dynamics, often catalyzing new ecosystems and raising novel governance challenges.
We invite theoretical and empirical work that explains how digital services are designed, implemented, diffused, and evolved—particularly in the era of AI and immersive technologies—and how these mechanisms translate into lasting impact. We are especially interested in multiple-level outcomes:
Consumers: shifts in perceptions, attitude, behavior, trust, and welfare.
Organizations: changes in capabilities, governance, workforce skills, and processes.
Markets/Ecosystems: platform competition, complementarities, interoperability, and industry disruption.
Societal/Ethical: privacy, fairness, inclusion, accountability, safety, and sustainability.
To push the frontier, we encourage diverse Information Systems approaches, including design science, econometric/causal inference, field and lab experiments, computational/AI methods, simulations/agent-based models, and qualitative case studies. Submissions that integrate multiple methods or triangulate across datasets are especially welcome.
Our goal is to sharpen IS theory and spark novel insights by identifying the socio-technical pathways through which digital services generate, or fail to generate, systemic change, while foregrounding the trade-offs that accompany transformation (e.g., productivity vs. displacement, personalization vs. privacy, openness vs. control). We seek contributions with clear theoretical advances and actionable implications for managers, policymakers, and technology designers.
Topics
We welcome a broad range of topics in the relevant areas. Examples include, but are not limited to:
I. Governance and strategy
1. Digital service governance and regulation: privacy, accountability, safety, ethics, and cross-jurisdictional policy.
2. Strategic management of digital ecosystems/platforms: value capture, boundary resources, multi-sided network effects, and platform competition/co-opetition.
3. Data strategy and stewardship.
II. Emerging technologies and design
4. AI and intelligent automation in services: impacts of GenAI, machine learning, robotic process automation on jobs, skill development, and decision augmentation.
5. Design science for immersive services: VR/AR/metaverse artifacts, evaluation methods, and value assessment.
6. Responsible/trustworthy service design: transparency, human-in-the-loop, safety-by-design.
III. Service and value innovation
7. Digital servitization and business model transformation.
8. E-government, e-health, and other public e-services.
9. Customer experience and value co-creation: digitally mediated journeys, personalization, and service recovery.
10. Data products and API-based services: monetization, interoperability, standards, and developer ecosystems.
IV. Societal and ethical impact
11. Digital service equity and inclusion: accessibility, digital divide, and inclusive design.
12. Sustainability and green IS through digital services.
13. Algorithmic fairness and consumer welfare.
14. Security and resilience of digital services.