CPR

Welcome to the 46th Annual Computer Personnel Research Conference -- ACM SIGMIS CPR 2008. For forty-six years, the CPR conference has presented quality research on the themes of managing the information technology (IT) workforce. This year's theme is Refilling the Pipeline: Meeting Renewed Demand for IT Workers.

The composition of the Information Technology (IT) Workforce is rapidly changing as many of the baby boomers are retiring or planning to retire, the number of US college students majoring in information systems has declined significantly, and the federal government continually changes the number of allowable work visas. In the spring of 2007, the Information Technology Association of America (Tasker, 2007, http://www.itaa.org/workforce) identified the need to double the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) graduates over the next 10 years as a solution to the number one issue: Promote US IT Industry Competitiveness at Home and in Global Markets. The need to refill the IT pipeline has implications for both the research and practice of information systems management.

Few would question the role that science and technology have played in building today's knowledge society and developing innovations with global impact. The management of information systems is increasingly international and interdisciplinary; it often crosses traditional boundaries of institutions, geography, language and culture. No more clearly can this be seen than in this year's CPR conference. The call for papers attracted 32 submissions from Taiwan, Singapore, Europe, Ireland, and the United States; of these 23 were accepted. The papers and panels in this year's conference cover topics such as using action research to study workforce diversity, investigating work family conflict for the IT worker, high school computer camps, and IT professional work identity.