Due to various circumstances (from geopolitical complications to travel budget reductions), this year’s KIN delegation at the annual International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) in Nashville consisted of two researchers: Lorna Downie and Bart van den Hooff.
Data, Bodies, and the lessons from the Peter Pan story
Downie presented the paper she co-authored with Ella Hafermalz and Stella Pachidi: Hooked on Shadows: How Organizations Sustain Bodies at Work Through Data.
In a very lively and engaging presentation, Downie shared insights from a long-term ethnographic study of a national tennis federation to show why prevention needs to sit at the heart of workplace well-being, and how elite sport offers powerful lessons on how to do this. She introduced the concept data shadow —which she defined as a digital counterpart of a person created through everyday interactions with sociotechnical infrastructure.
To bring this idea to life, Downie drew on the story of Peter Pan, whose shadow becomes detached from his body and is sewn back on by Wendy, cementing their friendship. Using this metaphor, she explained that effective prevention depends on keeping data closely connected to the lived experiences of athletes; otherwise, data shadows can take on a life of their own or disappear altogether. Drawing on her research, she showed that this approach worked best when athletes were actively involved in decisions made from their data, and when data was used to make nuanced changes to training plans. The key message: sustaining bodies at work through data is less about collecting more data, and more about keeping it meaningfully connected to the people it represents.
When Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up
Van den Hooff presented a paper co-authored with Rolf van Baar and Edona Elshan: Technical Debt in the Balance: The Role of Enterprise Architecture Management. This paper also highlights the quality of our Digital Business and Innovation Master’s program: the paper is based on Rolf’s DBI thesis, and he is also the first author on this work.
This paper discusses the issue of technical debt (TD), which essentially refers to “IT maintenance obligations that make further system modifications increasingly difficult, risky, and costly”—in other words, decisions, errors, workarounds etc in the delivery of IT systems that may provide short term benefits but lead to higher costs in the end. The focus of the paper is on how different approaches towards Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) are related to managing TD. Based on four case studies, Rolf and his co-authors find that both a top-down (“Administrative”) and a bottom-up (“Adaptive”) approach towards EAM have benefits as well as drawbacks in relation to the management of different forms of TD. The core message of the paper is that organizations should balance these approaches to maximize the benefits and minimize the drawbacks. The paper presents a framework in which different practices are described that need to be combined in an ongoing cycle to attain such a balance, as well as different factors that influence the way this balance can be achieved in different contexts.
Research Meets Rhythm
ICIS 2025 took place in Nashville, called “Music City” for good reason. Live bands played throughout the day, and the conference social event was held in one of the city’s bars. A lively band delivered a memorable rendition of The Devil Went Down to Georgia, complete with impressive fiddlin’ acrobatics and, of course, line dancing. Guided by two highly motivating instructors in Stetsons and boots, the IS community demonstrated its ability to take on temporal, physical, and coordinative challenges. Downie and van den Hooff more than held their own, defending KIN’s honor.
In between sessions and social events, KIN researchers also enjoyed many conversations with fellow scholars—reconnecting with familiar faces and meeting new ones. Altogether, ICIS 2025 offered a rich mix of academic exchange, inspiration, and community, making it a valuable conference experience despite the smaller delegation.