It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the Annual Computers and People Research Conference - ACM SIGMIS-CPR 2018. For more than 50 years, ACM SIGMIS CPR has engaged the academic and practitioner communities in understanding the issues related to the interaction of people with computers, what we now broadly refer to as information technology (IT).
The theme of this year's conference is Transforming Healthcare through IT'. From transformation of healthcare delivery through the application of new tools to support information sharing and decision making, to transformation of the clinician-patient relationship through vastly increased information for patients through social media and other sources, to applications of data analytics to identify new treatments and new approaches to population health - virtually no area of healthcare is left unchanged by IT. This interdisciplinary topic spans multiple levels of analysis (individual, team, organi-zation, and societal), and draws on a variety of perspectives (healthcare, information systems, opera-tions management, organizational behavior, computer science, economics, sociology, psychology, etc.). Our theme-related papers are similarly diverse in their foci and perspectives, but they share a desire to understand how applications of IT support the transformation of our health and our healthcare organizations.
Our other papers address the traditional SIGMIS theme of computers and people. They showcase topics of current theoretical and practical relevance - such as implications of emerging technologies such as social media and gamification for the IT workforce, effects of IT on the workforce such as tech-nostress, workforce development, and IT workforce practices such as agile and crowdsourcing.
Of special note this year are two keynote addresses, one by Daniel Porreca, the executive director of HEALTHeLINK the clinical information exchange and HEALTHeNET the administrative data ex-change for Western New York (WNY), on the topic Connecting at the Intersection of Technology and Healthcare, and the other by Viswanath Venkatesh, Distinguished Professor and Billingsley Chair in Information Systems at the Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas and one of the most influential and highly-cited scholar in the IS discipline, on the topic Doing Research That Matters: Reflecting on the Past and Charting a Future for ICT4D. Also of special note this year is an industry-academia panel that will address issues related to the conference theme and that is comprised of two senior industry executives who have shaped and continue to shape the transformation in the healthcare industry, and two professors who are engaged in understanding the digital transformation occurring around us in general, and that occurring in the healthcare arena, and its implications on work in healthcare services and on our individual lives. Last but not the least, the doctoral consortium at the conference provides an opportunity to doctoral students, who are the budding scholars of our discipline, to refine their scholarly ideas through their interactions with faculty mentors, many of whom are and were journal editors, and with fellow students, in addition to growing their professional networks.
