Together with the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2013) and the International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI 2013) the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2013) is one of the top 3 platforms worldwide for both researchers and practitioners in the domain of Information Systems. ECIS 2013 will take place from 5th to 8th June at Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
This year’s ECIS has had 813 submissions from authors from all over the world out of which 247 where selected to be presented at the conference. Compared to WI 2013 the acceptance rate of ECIS 2013 is slightly higher (30% vs. 25,5%) but still very competitive.
We are delighted that after 2011 and 2012 our group will be also be present at ECIS 2013 – with three studies that we conducted together with colleagues at the University of Sydney, the University of Osnabrück and Copenhagen Business School.

Christian Herzog, Alexander Richter, Melanie Steinhüser, Uwe Hoppe, Michael Koch: Methods and Metrics for measuring the success of enterprise social software – what we can learn from pracitice and vice versa
With Enterprise Social Software (ESS) being increasingly used for internal communication and collaboration, an important question is how their success can be measured. In this paper we contribute to answering this question by investigating which methods and metrics organizations are currently applying for measuring ESS success. Our study is supposed to provide a comprehensive overview of the methods and metrics applied in practice to measure ESS success. (download .pdf)

Alexander Richter, Kai Riemer: The contextual nature of enterprise social networking: a multi case study comarison
We have argued before that enterprise social networking (ESN) is built on malleable technologies that do not lend themselves to immediate forms of workplace usage determined or prescribed by their features. In this paper we consolidate three years of case study research into ESN adoption and use. With our large empirical data set we are able to demonstrate the contextual nature of ESN as an emergent phenomenon that takes on different forms in different organisational contexts. Drawing on this data we derive a theory of ESN usage, which employs a set of use cases to provide a better picture of the possibilities of ESN when appropriated into team, project or large enterprise contexts. (download .pdf)

Mathias Trier, Alexander Richter: “I can simply…” – Theorizing Simplicitiy as a design principle and usage factor
In this paper we identify and conceptualize Simplicity as an influential design principle and usage factor of corporate social software. We propose a theoretical framework that helps us to empirically study the role of simplicity based on six case vignettes implementation and use. From the theoretical basis and the empirical analysis we develop a series of theoretical propositions and discuss implications for IS design and adoption. (download .pdf)

CSCM @ ECIS 2013