CPR

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the annual Computers and People Research Conference -- ACM SIGMIS CPR 2017. For more than 50 years, ACM SIGMIS CPR has engaged the academic and practitioner communities in understanding the issues related to the interaction of people with computers, what we now broadly refer to as information technology (IT). The current rapidly changing technological landscape is providing organizations and individuals with new tools for working, communication, and collaboration. Increasingly, smartphones and mobile commerce are changing our buying and consumer behaviors; wearable fitness trackers are making us more health conscious; social media and social networks are shifting the ways in which humans interact and collaborate together; start-ups are revamping business models by utilizing digital connections to fuel a sharing economy; and digital transformations are being used to address concerns of health, education, and civic engagement. A variety of social media and mobile technologies are also empowering individuals, communities, and societies to engage and interact with each other to enrich their own lives and to bring about a positive change in the world in which we live. In other words, digital technologies are enabling the transformation not only of business and organizations, but also of how people experience work and life. As a result, we selected the conference theme of Digital Transformation: The Changing Nature of Organizations, Work and Societies for this year's conference.

The papers, posters, keynotes, and the industry-academia panel at the conference address topics and ideas related specifically to the conference theme in addition to the more traditional topics of the interaction between computers and people that the ACM SIGMIS CPR community typically addresses. Several papers and posters this year focus on the thematic topics of digital business and innovation, architecture of digital organizations, social media and social networks, digital empowerment, and digital health in addition to the topics of IT workforce management, software projects and outsourcing, IT security, and institutions and organizations. Of special note this year are two keynote addresses, one by Kris Gopalakrishnan, the co-founder of the iconic Indian IT services company Infosys, chairman of Axilor, and an IT industry pioneer, on the topic Changes in Globalisation & Indian IT Industry Transformation, and the other by Sunil Mithas, a prolific author, a highly-cited scholar, and a professor at the University of Maryland, on the topic Digital Intelligence and Transformations. Also of special note this year is an industry-academia panel that will address issues related to the conference theme and that is comprised of three senior IT executives who are directly shaping through their work the digital world we live in and will live in, and two professors who are engaged in understanding the digital transformation occurring around us and its implications on our work and our lives. To cap it all, an industry visit to Infosys is also planned so participants can see first-hand the Bangalore campus of this iconic Indian IT firm that many of us refer to in our courses, and engage directly with senior executives of this firm to understand their vision and their work in moving to the next stage of digital work. Last but not the least, the doctoral consortium at the conference provides an opportunity to doctoral students, who are the budding scholars of our discipline, to refine their scholarly ideas through their interactions with faculty mentors, many of whom are and were journal editors, and with fellow students, in addition to growing their professional networks.

The various volunteer committees at any scholarly conference play a critical role in making it happen, and this conference is no exception. However, it is the authors, the reviewers, and many other volunteers and supporters who are really critical to the success of any conference. This conference in Bangalore, India would really not have been possible without the many authors and doctoral students who submitted their high-quality work, without the many reviewers who provided their timely and constructive reviews to submitted papers and doctoral proposals, and the faculty mentors who willingly agreed to give their time to interact with invited doctoral students in the doctoral consortium, and we would like to thank them all for their consideration and dedicated efforts.