Program Co-Chairs Message

Welcome to the First International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST 2006) being held on the campus of Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California on February 24-25, 2006. We are very pleased to have you here to participate in the birth of a new and exciting forum dedicated solely to the issues of design science research in Information Systems.

Early last year, when we first discussed the possibility of this conference, we were anxious, apprehensive, and concerned whether there would be sufficient interest and whether we would get a critical mass of people involved. But, over the past year, it has turned out to be a wonderful endeavor. Our program committee members gladly agreed, a call for papers was issued, and we started receiving queries and abstracts. The entire IS community joined in to make the conference a success. We encountered a large number of IS researchers working in design science research and yet we never had a dedicated forum until now. We strongly believe that this is a major research paradigm and one that has the maximum potential to make an impact.

From the call for papers, we received a total of 49 papers that originated from the following countries: Australia (4), Canada (3), China (1), Denmark (1), Finland (2), Germany (2), India (2), Portugal (1), South Korea (1), Sweden (3), Switzerland (1), United Arab Emirates (1), UK (1) and USA (26). The review process was double blind. Each paper received at least 2 reviews and all reviews were done by PC members and external reviewers. We accepted 23 papers initially but one author had to withdraw his paper as he could not attend. We were left with 22 papers for the final program which brings the acceptance rate to 44%. Several additional papers that addressed interesting topics were assigned for poster presentations.

In addition to papers and posters, you will enjoy two excellent keynote talks by leaders in our field, one distinguished lecture, and two exciting panels that address many facets of design science. We are also pleased to inform you that through a grant from the National Science Foundation, we are running a concurrent workshop on Women in IT – Emerging Leaders to promote high school girls and undergraduate women to pursue careers in IS, IT and CS. As you know, there has been a steady decline in the enrollment of women toward careers in science and technology. We hope that this workshop will play a small part by introducing them to the wonderful world of design and high technology.

We would finally like to thank the authors of all submitted manuscripts for the effort and creativity that went into the generation of papers. We also owe a great deal to the many reviewers from outside and within PC. Their efforts are the backbone for such an endeavor. We gratefully acknowledge their support, services, and contributions.

So what is the future for DESRIST? We believe that this is a strong start and hope that this initial conference will generate a momentum for continuation in some form for the future. So thank you for attending the conference and enjoy your stay in Claremont. Your time will be well spent and your contributions greatly appreciated.

Samir Chatterjee and Alan Hevner
Technical Program Committee Co-Chairs