About the workshop

According to Immanuel Kant, ethics is concerned with the question, “What ought I to do?”, as opposed to the other three basic questions “What can I know?”, “What can I hope?”, and “What is human?”. “What ought I to do as a Business Informatics researcher?” therefore is the central question of the theme “Ethics and Morality in Business Informatics”. As this question is fundamentally philosophical in nature, it does not only concern judgments about proper conduct in specific situations. Instead, the questions invites reflections at a higher level of abstraction, enabling a critical reflection about methodological principles of our discipline from a distinctively philosophical outlook.

For example, it is possible to examine how basic principles and concepts of Business Informatics are related to more encompassing concepts of human life in general. In this vein, concepts like process, architecture, decision model, algorithm, and organizational rule can be studied against the backdrop of concepts like Weltanschauung, human rights, and values. The workshop “Ethics and Morality in Business Informatics” is meant to address questions of this kind.

Important Dates

2021-03-01 2021-03-13 (extended) Paper submission at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=caise2021

2021-04-05 2021-04-12 2021-04-15 Notifications to authors

2021-04-12 2021-04-19 2021-04-26 Camera-ready version

2021-06-29 Workshop online

Topics

Submissions to the workshop are invited to discuss ethical and moral questions arising in the whole spectrum of topics of Business Informatics and Information Systems. The following suggestions provide an impression of the intended orientation of the workshop, but you are cordially invited to propose additional topics.

• Are the subjects of Business Informatics associated with specific ethical questions? As the subjects in Business Informatics typically are intangible, does this raise a need for specific procedures to justify proper conduct of Business Informatics research?

• Do (research) methods in Business Informatics involve specific value statements or Weltanschauung?

• Which implications for classical moral philosophies arise from recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research?

• What challenges arise from the availability of IT-supported machines that should act as stand-alone agents (autonomous cars, drones)? Are there any pitfalls in Machine Learning based decision support?

• Are certain species of moral philosophies (e. g., deontologist or consequentialist moral theories) especially relevant for Business Informatics? Do typical decision models in Business Informatics implicate the basic principles of specific moral theories (e. g., consequentialism)?

• What kind of statements could a „Code of Ethics“ for Business Informatics professionals include (as opposed, e.g., to the “Code of Ethics” of ACM)?

• What experiences in relation to ethical questions were made in previous Business Informatics research projects?

• What initiatives concerning ethical values in Business Informatics do already exist in academia and industry? What are the results of these initiatives?

• How are ethical topics considered in Business Informatics curriculums at universities world-wide?

• ...and many more.

Submission

The workshop invites submissions that discuss actions or principles of actions as manifested in methodological assumptions and commitments in Business Informatics and Information Systems from an ethical point of view. This also includes experience reports about concrete projects in academia and industry where questions about right and wrong conduct played a significant role. Submissions are both invited to raise questions and to report about situations where questions have already been answered in specific ways. Philosophical methods of inquiry are welcome, but not required.

Each submission will be reviewed by 3 members of the program committee. Accepted submissions will be presented during the CAiSE'21 conference by at least one author. The proceedings of the workshops will be published as one volume in the Springer LNBIP series.

The maximum number of pages is 12 (including title, abstract, bibliography, appendixes, author names and affiliations and acknowledgments). Short papers with a size up to 6 pages are also welcome. The abstract should not exceed 150 words. Keywords are optional. Please use the Springer LNCS template and upload your submission at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=caise2021.

Proceedings of Previous Events

Two earlier editions of the workshop were held in English and German under the name EMoWI. The proceedings of the EMoWI'19 workshop are published at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2297/. The EMoWI 2020 proceedings are available at https://library.gito.de/node/199 (at the bottom of the page).

Organizers

Dr. Jens Gulden, Utrecht University, Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Buys Ballot Laboratory, office 512, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands, j.gulden@uu.nl

Alexander Bock, University of Duisburg-Essen, Information Systems and Enterprise Modeling, Institute for Computer Science and Business Information Systems, Universitätsstr. 9, 45141 Essen, Germany, alexander.bock@uni-due.de

Dr. Sergio España Cubillo, Utrecht University, Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Buys Ballot Laboratory, office 577, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands, s.espana@uu.nl

Program Committee (tentative)

Başak Aydemir, Boğaziçi University, Turkey
Oliver Bendel, School of Business FHNW, Switzerland
Dominik Bork, University of Vienna, Austria
Fabiano Dalpiaz, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Hector Florez, Universidad Distrital Francisco Jose de Caldas, Colombia
Ulrich Frank, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Waqar Hussein, Monash University, Australia
Sedef Akinli Kocak, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
Assaf Marron, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Björn Niehaves, University of Siegen, Germany
Ezio Di Nucci, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Kai Riemer, University of Sydney, Australia
Stefan Strecker, Fernuniversität in Hagen, Germany

Registration

Please register at the main conference for the workshop day on Tuesday, 29 June 2021. It is possible to register for workshops only.