Dear friends
A belated Happy New Year to you all! I hope that you are all well.
Last year was an interesting, if sometimes challenging year for us all. We used the pandemic to develop a series on online symposiums. These were well attended and provided a wide variety of interesting talks that were very informative. A huge thank you to those friends that lead those events. We would like to keep this going and at the conference in October agreed to four more in 2022, so watch out for dates for these – but if you would like to volunteer to run one yourself or organize one for another speaker / panel you know of then please let me know.
The conference in Utrecht was awesome, and we sincerely thank the team who organised it all – led by Diana and Pascal. It was held in a new conference suite on their beautiful and impressive campus. We had a tour of the campus as part of the event, including looking at a smart building that the university had built recently, as well as visits to Amersfoort and Amsterdam.
We were truly inspired by starting with the PhD colloquium. We heard about some really exciting and far reaching research programs from doctoral students. We then progressed into the regular conference during which two keynote talks were given:
First, Anand Sheombar on digital rights in Africa (Anand Sheombar – IIMA). I found this fascinating drawing on the power of governments, the way the pandemic has been used to control civic space, and the position social media platforms play as a data monopoly.
Our second keynote talk was from Erik Proper from the Luxemburg Institute for Science and Technology on Enterprises as Model Driven Systems (http://iima.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/20211019_model-driven_enterprises.pdf). He discussed the opportunities and challenges of using modelling to design enterprises and keeping these models up to date in an agile process, continuously changing organization and dynamic world context.
And so, while the conference ended up as a hybrid of in person and online attendance the event was wonderful. We can’t wait for the next conference – and with travel restrictions being lifted again we are very hopeful that it will be in person again.
We confirmed that we would go to Seattle in October 2022 24th to 26th. The early call is out already under the theme of “The State of Digital Transformation” so start to write those papers as we want to see a full gathering again. You can find the full call here: Call for Papers – IIMA
Kind regards
Professor Ian Allison
President