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Co-Chairs
Huub Ruël
University of Twente, The Netherlands
h.j.m.ruel@utwente.nl

Rodrigo Magalhaes
Kuwait-Maastricht Business School, Kuwait
Rodrigo@kmbs.edu.kw

Background and Goals
After a very successful 1st International Workshop on Human Resource Information Systems in Madeira, Portugal, it became clear that the journey of discovery into this new area of academic endeavour had to continue.

Human Resource Information Systems have been a subject of academic study for about two decades. However since the end of the 1990’s this subject has grown in importance as the widespread application of web technology has given a boost to the development of web-based HRISs. With the use of web technology, HRISs have crossed the borders of the HR department and have began to impact the wider organization: senior management, line managers and last but for sure not least, employees. With this development studying HRIS has become more complex, with HRISs evolving into information systems entangled with all aspects of organization. In other words, HRISs cannot be seen just as a technology but as the result of the integration of ICT and organization. This perspective provokes the emergence a whole new array of research topics for this field.

Starting from the assumption that HRISs are concerned with people management, it is apparent that the research topics covered by this subject can be very broad indeed. So, what are HRISs? In our view, HRISs are no different from other types of information systems in terms of their basic definition, i.e. complex social objects which are the outcome of the embedding of computer systems into an organization and where the technical from the social factors are not possible to take apart due to the cultural values and the political interests intervening alongside technological potentialities and constraints, in the development of the system.

Regarding, the purposes of HRIS, we suggest the following three groups:

• Operational
  The execution of all the basic HRM practices (e.g. payroll, recruitment, training or appraisal systems)

• Tactical
  The integration, coordination and control of all the basic HRM policies and practices (e.g. intranet)

• Strategic
  Contribution towards the organization’s strategy (e.g. systems providing strategic information, strategic data mining, enabling innovation, providing feedback on strategic performance or facilitating change)

The technological systems (i.e. ICT) which support the above purposes are the concern of two broad communities: a community of users and a community of providers. The community of users are the HR specialists who know about the use given to the ICT application. The community of providers are the systems engineers whose expertise is in designing, developing, implementing and maintaining the information systems that the users use. Traditionally, these two communities do not talk much to each other.

HR work in organizations follows processes which are well known to HR specialists in terms of day-today execution. However, when such work is mediated by ICT applications the processes need to be made explicit and this where the systems engineers come in. Systems engineers are expert in the modelling of processes, but they have only a vague knowledge of the of day-to-day execution. On the other hand, most HR specialists have a very sketchy understanding of process modelling. This is why the dialogue between the two communities becomes difficult.

Lately, ICT specialists have gone one step up and they have become interested in organizational modelling within a discipline called Organizational Engineering (OE). OE aggregates multi-disciplinary concepts, methods and technology to model, develop and analyze various aspects of changing organizations. One of its major concerns is to understand the enterprise architecture and the relationships between business strategy, business processes and the business support systems in order to create and keep the alignment between these complementary domains.

In order to overcome the huge gap between supply and demand a better understanding or, in other words, a new language is needed by both communities. As an example, enterprise architecture might provide an opportunity for a language understood by both HR and ICT specialists. Enterprise architecture is no more than a modelling technique which can be expressed in more technical terms or in a more natural language that everybody understands. Once a common language is established, both communities will be able to talk, with the HR specialists expressing the organizational needs (demand) and the ICT specialists putting forward the technological offer (supply). In order to be effective such a language needs to be not so technical that only the ICT folk will understand it nor so unstructured that it will be impossible to operationalize it in terms of automated systems.

The workshop is aimed at advancing research and practice in HRIS by bringing together the two communities discussed above to explore new understandings around the theme engineering the organization for people management. Such exploration will be carried out with two key objectives:

(1) finding out how the perspectives of the two communities converge or diverge in terms of research objectives, methodologies and results.
(2) identifying research areas or topics where members of the two communities might work together

Topics of interest
We welcome both theoretical and practical papers related to aspects such as:

• Development and Implementation of HRIS
• HRIS and Enterprise Architectures
• Dynamic Enterprise Architectures
• The impact of real-time information on HRIS
• Visual management and HRIS
• The role of HRIS in Knowledge Management
• IT-user interaction in HRIS project management
• Requirements elicitation and validation for HRM information systems
• Process modelling and HRIS
• Organizational modelling and HRIS
• The limits of organizational modelling
• Ethical issues of organizational modelling
• Enterprise integration requirements versus HRM needs
• The relationship between HRIS developers and users
• The impact of HRIS on organizational learning
• HRIS and the HR function
• Organization strategy, HRM, and modelling of HR processes
• Process modelling for HRIS and organizational change
• Sourcing and process modelling

Categories of papers
Two main categories of submission will be considered: 1) regular papers and 2) work in progress by PhD students.

The best papers will be selected for a special issue of the International Journal of Business Information Systems.

Submission of Papers
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers in any of the areas listed above. All papers must be written in English, and the length of the paper should not exceed 5,000 words or 10 pages (including figures and tables). Papers (in PDF format) should be submitted online through the online submission system. Instructions for preparing the manuscripts are available at the ICEIS web-site: http://www.iceis.org/ In addition, an e-mail must be sent to both co-chairs of the Workshop indicating the title of the submitted paper and the area of interest.

Format
The Workshop will consist of oral presentations of peer-reviewed papers and invited speeches.

Workshop Proceedings
All accepted papers will be published in a workshop proceedings book with an ISBN#, which will be issued by INSTICC Press. The proceedings will be available at the time of the workshop.

Important Dates
Paper Submission: Deadline Expired
Author Notification: Deadline Expired
Final Camera-Ready and Registration: Deadline Expired

Workshop Program Committee
Jose Tribolet, Portugal
Bernard Fallery, France
Mark Lankhorst, The Netherlands
Michel Delorme, Kuwait
Stefan Strohmeier, Germany
Jos Benders, The Netherlands
Hilkka Poutanen, Finland
Marielba Zacarias, Portugal
Reima Suomi, Finland
Graeme Martin, UK
Tanya Bondarouk, The Netherlands
Miguel R. Olivas-Lujan, Mexico / US
Ronald Batenburg, The Netherlands
Joe Peppard, UK
Klaas Sikkel, The Netherlands

Workshop Location
The workshop will take place in conjunction with the 10th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2008) in Barcelona - Spain.

Registration Information
At least one author of an accepted paper must register for the workshop. If the registration fees are not received by April 14, 2008, the paper will not be published in the proceedings. Attending the Workshop requires registration. For registering go to http://www.iceis.org

Secretariat
ICEIS 2008 Secretariat - The Second International Workshop on Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS 2008)
E-mail: workshops@iceis.org
Web site: http://www.iceis.org