Digital Transformation of Contemporary Business Practices

• Professor Robert Wood, University of Manchester, UK, R.Wood@bolton.ac.uk
• Dr Imran Akhtar, University of Bolton, UK, I.Akhtar@bolton.ac.uk
• Dr Farag Edghiem, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, F.Edghiem@bolton.ac.uk

• Professor Robert Wood
• Dr Imran Akhtar
• Dr Farag Edghiem

A wide spectrum of business industries and organisations are benefitting from the unprecedented digital transformation. With multiple unconventional applications such as robotics, artificial intelligence AI and the internet of things IoT many businesses are enabled to deliver more efficient, sustainable and higher standard business models and customer services. This foremost shift in industry practices marks increased levels of technology acceptance and customers’ quality expectations.

Ever since the arrival of the modern digital computer into various areas of business applications in the 1950s and 60s researchers have sought to study the impact of such technology on individual work systems, managerial decision making and organizational structure in particular. The focus initially was almost always on the effects, both good and bad, of AUTOMATING existing work processes and procedures. In the 70s and 80s the work of Shoshanna Zuboff in her book “In the Age of the Smart Machine” opened up the possibilities of what she termed INFORMATING, where the simple possession of data and information became as, or even more, important that the computerised systems that were generating the data in the first place.

Traditionally, scholars such as Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) and Davis (1989) have proposed models for technology acceptance. Several theoretical models emerged, eventually, to conceptualize this phenomenon including technology acceptance model TAM (Davis et al., 1989), innovation diffusion theory (Moore and Benbasat, 1991), motivational model (Davis et al., 1992), combined model of TAM and TPB (Taylor and Todd, 1995), TAM 2 (Venkatesh and Davis, 2000), unified theory of acceptance and use of technology UTAUT (Venkatesh et al., 2003) and TAM 3 (Venkatesh and Bala, 2008). The feeling of technology taking care of one’s needs affect customers’ emotional and psychological responses to this technology, thus increasing the degree of acceptance of service robots (Stock and Merkle, 2018; Wirtz et al., 2018; Belanche et al., 2020). From an organizational perspective, such positive responses generate higher customer satisfaction, resulting in increased sales revenue and customer retention (Lacity and Willcocks, 2016; Schatsky and Arora, 2017).

In this conference track, special attention is given to the three domains of internet of things IoT, robotic process automation RPA and artificial intelligence AI contemporary applications and how it contributed to advancing business industries. Robotic process automation RPA (Oshri & Plugge, 2021) has accelerated over the last decade to provide unprecedented ways to replace human workers (Zhang and Liu, 2019). Recently, technological development has led many organizations to implement software technology in the form of robotic RPA, which automates work by virtually mimicking employee procedures (Agnes, 2021). RPA remains as an effective method that automates manual and error-prone tasks that are repetitive and emulates a virtual workforce to perform business operational tasks (Pramod, 2021).

The rapid development of artificial intelligence AI has brought great convenience to people’s lives in many ways (Zhong et al., 2021). AI is widely perceived as a present-day technology to make us live in a ‘smart’ environment. For example, components such as smart home, smart care (Glende et al., 2016; Lam, 2015), home cleaning (Vaussard et al., 2014), smart fueling, smart ordering and various types of robots (Zhong et al., 2021; Russell and Norvig, 2016; Ivanov, 2017; LaGrandeur and Hughes, 2017) are trendy business offerings to improvise living standards.

The internet of things IoT is a rapidly growing domain of business. With so many devices and machines connected to the internet, there is a growing opportunity for businesses to take advantage of this technology. Since the 1990s, of course, the world of technology has been dominated by the meteoric rise of the Internet and its associated applications, most notably the World Wide Web. The rise of the Web has provided two major changes in focus with regard to the impact of technology on human behaviour and organized activity: firstly, technology now impacts on EVERY aspect of human life and not just business and industry. So-called Social Media permeate almost every household bringing both undeniable benefits but at the same time increasing problems involving mental health issues and anti-social behaviour. Secondly, anything and everything may now be considered to be data and information. The move away from pure text to music, graphical images, video and the like offers up enormous possibilities for innovative ways of communicating between individuals as well as within groups and societies as a whole.

The discussed developments, in relevance to digital transformation, have led to the claim that such developments have the potential to transform the ways in which we live our lives, operate our businesses and govern ourselves. However, research has also shown that the technology itself is only one part of the complex puzzle that must be solved if such transformations are to be successful. Many writers still assert that we lack a comprehensive intellectual understanding of the phenomenon as well as its implications at multiple levels of analysis. Thus, this conference track aims to attract empirical and conceptual contributions to add to the current understanding of how we can successfully adopt these novel digital technologies in order to realise efficiency and effectiveness across business industries.

Some of the topics are listed but not limited to the following:

• Robotic process automation RPA
• Artificial intelligence AI
• Internet of things IoT

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit papers for this special theme session on Digital Transformation of Contemporary Business Practices on or before 31^st December 2022.

All submissions must be original and may not be under review by another publication.

All papers should be submitted via Easychair on the following link: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=dtcbp23

INTERESTED AUTHORS SHOULD CONSULT THE CONFERENCE’S GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSIONS at https://icactce-conf.com/call-for-papers-2/.

All submitted papers will be reviewed on a double-blind, peer review basis.

All the accepted papers (after double blinded peer review) will be published within the ICACTCE’23 Proceedings (SCOPUS Indexed).

Further extended accepted papers will be published in the special issues of SCI/SCOPUS/WoS/DBLP/ACM/EI indexed Journals.

NOTE: While submitting paper in this special session, please specify Digital Transformation of Contemporary Business Practices  at the top (above paper title) of the first page of your paper.