Track Chair: Marcello Martinez, Seconda University  degli Studi di Napoli

Organisations have relentlessly increased their use of IS, seen as a means to help managers improve the effectiveness of their decisions in a turbulent and fast-changing environment. Nevertheless, information systems in companies tend to preserve their very nature of being tools embedded in and dependent on the organisational context and resistant to imitations, thanks to the personal and human factors linked to their implementation. Their outcome is definitely much more complex than the apparent (easy to grasp) intended goal of providing information for action, drawing on available data. Their nature tends to belong to that typical of social systems, affected by goals, values and preferences of individuals, except for the pieces of technology employed and the flows of data which can be designed in advance. As IS are deeply intertwined with working procedures within organisations, their introduction and implementation bring about heavy consequences with regard to the ways in which work is carried out and distributed among the actors in the organisation. The literature has provided the means for analysing the various types of change they may encounter such as emergent, anticipated, planned and, lately, opportunity-based change. How is this helping organisations of our times to implement change? This track is focused on how organisations are currently coping with continual and rapid change. In particular, attention will be paid to the strategies or practices that they are using to tackle the implementation of change and to the role of change agents to reduce resistance to the specific change.

Suggested topics:

-	Organisational change and the implementation of IS/IT related change
-	Coping with fast and continual change within organisations
-	Strategies for implementing change
-	Change management theories
-	The role of managers in implementing change
-	The relationship between the use of IT and organisational innovation