1 Special Focus

Culture is recognized as an important factor influencing the development, deployment and use of information systems. It relates to the organizational, professional and national attitudes, values, goals, and practices of the actors involved. Cultural awareness is a key capability for avoiding problems and ensuring a proper fit between individuals, tasks, and information technology.

For instance, professionals from different nations with differing cultural backgrounds and capabilities have continuously increased their level of cooperation in order to develop new systems and services. The success of nearshoring or offshoring projects largely depends on managing the cultural diversity of the professionals on the client and the vendor side. Moreover, offshoring vendors have developed global delivery models in order to combine local and cultural characteristics to enhance global operations. In the deployment phase, the cultural values embedded in the system deployed by the vendor may differ enormously from the cultural assumptions of the client organization. In the use phase, the business or service processes supported often also span many boundaries of systems and organizations. Therefore, the cultural diversity of the users and a variety of other stakeholders needs to be taken into account as well.

This special focus issue of the BISE journal is seeking IS research contributions which explicitly take cultural aspects in every stage of the IS lifecycle into account.

Contributions from research and business practice on the following (and related) topics are invited:

  • National and organizational aspects of culture in IS

  • Theories and models which address culture in IS

  • The influence of culture on the choice of research methodology

  • Research methodologies that specifically apply for culture

  • Comparative studies covering multiple cultures

  • Culture and individual characteristics

  • Observable properties of culture in IS

  • Case studies of IS (development, deployment, adoption, diffusion) in different cultures

  • The role of gender in IT in different cultures

  • Concepts and examples of cultural intelligence

  • Further aspects of culture and IS

2 Submission

Please submit papers for the sections BISE – Research Paper and BISE – State of the Art by 2011-07-01 at the latest via the journal’s online submission system (http://www.editorialmanager.com/buis/). Please observe the instructions regarding the format and size of contributions to Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE)/WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK. Papers should not exceed 10 pages; this amounts to 50,000 characters including spaces, minus 5,000 characters per page for illustrations. Detailed authors’ guidelines can be downloaded from http://www.bise-journal.org.

All papers will be reviewed anonymously (double-blind process) by several referees with regard to relevance, originality, and research quality. In addition to the editors of the journal, including those of this special focus, distinguished national and international professionals with scientific and practical backgrounds will be involved in the review process.

Complementary articles covering topics of this special focus are also more than welcome.

Accepted papers will appear identically in English and German. The English-language version will appear in Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE), the German-language version will appear in WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK. Accepted papers will be translated in close cooperation with the authors and a professional team of translators.

3 Schedule

Submission deadline: 2011-07-01

Author notification: 2011-08-26

Completion of first revision: 2011-10-28

Author notification: 2011-12-16

Completion of a second revision (if needed, monolingual): 2012-01-20

Completion of a second revision (if needed, bilingual): 2012-02-17

Planned publication date of Issue 3/2012: June 2012