Most of the participants in this workshop participate in larger research initiatives that have very broad agendas addressing the development, application, and assessment of information systems in government and society. Some of these initiatives include:

• the program on Strategic Computing and Telecommunications in the Public Sector at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (Jerry Mechling), which “seeks to help public managers and policy makers understand and appropriately use the strategic potential of information technologies,”
• the Center for Technology in Government at the University at Albany (the host institution), which merges technology, management, and policy perspectives in conducting specific prototype projects designed to support innovative applications of technology to the practical problems of government, ¹
• the research group at the Copenhagen Business School (Kim Viborg Andersen), which focuses on organizational and social purposes of information systems at varying levels of analysis,
• the Instituto RSO (AnnaLaura Cubello), which engages in multidisciplinary research on such issues as organization design and development, service management, and human resource management,
• the program on Electronic Commerce, Law, and Information Policy Strategies (ECLIPS) at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (Jeffrey Ritter), which “conducts research concerning the legal and regulatory barriers that inhibit the rapid acceleration of electronic commerce,”²
• the Informatique Droit Linguistique at the Université de Paris (Danièle Bourcier) which conducts research on law, computers, and information systems, and
• the Centre for Management of Technology at the National University of Singapore (Poh Kam Wong), which conducts multidisciplinary research on innovation management focusing on Singapore and the Asia-Pacific region.

These research initiatives, bringing in a broad array of perspectives from multiple disciplines, help magnify the importance and effectiveness of the research discussed in this paper.