Platforms, sourcing and governance in the digital age
Track 22
Track chairs
Eleni Lioliou
Queen Mary University of London
Andreas Hein
University of St. Gallen
Nicola Ens
IT University of Copenhagen
Track description
The track “Platforms, Sourcing, and Governance in the Digital Age” focuses on how firms organise, coordinate, and govern digital work and resources across organisational and technological boundaries, including but not limited to sourcing arrangements and platform ecosystems. The proposed area of research brings together three closely related streams in Information Systems research: digital sourcing, digital platforms and ecosystems, and IS governance. These streams have traditionally evolved in parallel but are increasingly converging as organisations move from dyadic relationships toward complex, multilateral, and technology-mediated arrangements spanning organisational, geographic, and technological boundaries.
This track has been successfully organised at ECIS from 2022 to 2026 and has consistently attracted a vibrant community of scholars working at the intersection of sourcing, platforms, and governance. In 2026, the track received around 50 submissions, demonstrating strong and growing interest in the topic. The track is also closely connected to the AIS Special Interest Group on Digital Sourcing, Platforms, and Ecosystems (SIG DSPE), providing an established and active research community that regularly contributes to ECIS and other AIS conferences.
The relevance and timeliness of the track are underscored by profound shifts in the digital age. Organisations increasingly rely on platform-based infrastructures, modular digital technologies, and distributed ecosystems of actors to create value. At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence—particularly generative and agentic AI—are transforming sourcing and governance by introducing new forms of technology agency, enabling the delegation of increasingly complex and knowledge-intensive tasks to digital agents, and creating new dependencies on foundational infrastructures. These developments challenge established assumptions about control, coordination, and knowledge integration, and call for new theoretical and empirical insights into how organisations govern hybrid human–technology systems.
The track is closely aligned with the ECIS 2027 theme “Bridging Digital Borders”. Digital technologies both enable and constrain cross-boundary collaboration. Platforms, sourcing arrangements, and governance mechanisms define how actors connect across organisational, national, and technological borders, while also shaping new forms of exclusion, dependence, and control. By focusing on governance, relationships, and knowledge integration in digitally mediated ecosystems, the track directly addresses how such borders emerge, how they can be bridged, and whose interests they serve. In particular, topics such as platform governance, data governance, algorithmic management, regulatory interventions, and AI-enabled sourcing speak to the tensions between openness and control, inclusion and exclusion, and innovation and regulation highlighted in the conference theme.
We expect strong interest in the track again in 2027 and anticipate approximately 40–60 submissions, reflecting the continued growth and centrality of this research area within the IS community.
Topics of interest
- Platform design, governance, and strategy
- Digital sourcing configurations (e.g., multisourcing, crowdsourcing, cloud sourcing, platform-based sourcing)
- Intersections of sourcing and platforms, including how platforms reshape sourcing decisions and governance
- Governance of digital ecosystems and multilateral value networks
- IS governance in the digital age, including the democratization of IT (e.g., low-code/no-code, generative and agentic AI, citizen development)
- Algorithmic governance and governance of algorithmic decision-making processes
- Agentic AI and AI-based delegation as new forms of digital sourcing
- Data governance, data sourcing, and governance of AI and data infrastructures
- Power, dependence, and lock-in in platform ecosystems and digital sourcing arrangements
- Regulation and policy (e.g., Digital Markets Act, AI Act) and their implications for platforms, sourcing, and governance
- Knowledge integration, coordination, and learning across organizational and technological boundaries
- Sustainability, social responsibility, and societal implications of platforms, sourcing, and governance
- Critical perspectives on platforms, sourcing, and governance (e.g., inequality, exclusion, bias, and control)
- Emerging technologies (e.g., generative and agentic AI, distributed ledger technology, low-code/no-code) and their implications for sourcing, platforms, and governance
Associate editors
Lars Andraschko
ESSEC Business School, France
Erik Beulen
University of Manchester, UK
Tommaso Buganza
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Markus Böhm
Landshut University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Alex Wilson
Queen’s University Belfast
Panos Constantinides
University of Manchester, UK
Ben Eaton
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Amany Elbanna
University of Sussex, UK
Daniel Gozman
University of Sydney, Australia
Kazem Haki
HES-SO Geneva, Switzerland
Marin Jovanovic
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Tobias Kircher
Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany
Sachin Kumar
University of Bern, Switzerland
Dimitri Petrik
University of Stuttgart, Germany
Albert Plugge
Nyenrode Business University, Netherlands
