AISINDO Symposium 2023 Brings Together AIS Researchers in Surabaya

The 2023 annual symposium of the Association for Information Systems Indonesia Chapter — known locally as AISINDO — was held in late November at the Faculty of Economics and Business of Universitas Airlangga in Surabaya. The two-day event drew accounting information systems (AIS) and broader IS researchers from Indonesian universities together with a handful of visiting colleagues from the wider region.

This was the Chapter's first full-format in-person symposium since the pandemic-era disruptions, and from the program it was clear the organizing committee had used the gap to broaden the scope. Sessions were grouped around four loose themes: AIS pedagogy and curriculum, digital transformation in Indonesian SMEs, financial reporting systems and audit data analytics, and emerging topics including blockchain in accounting and AI-assisted decision support.

A regional, not just national, gathering

Although AISINDO is by mandate the Indonesian national chapter of the AIS, the symposium had a noticeably regional flavor. Several presenters travelled from universities in Malaysia and the Philippines, and the keynote slot was given over to a senior scholar working on AIS curriculum harmonization across ASEAN business schools. The organizing chair, in opening remarks, framed the symposium as an opportunity to "anchor Indonesian AIS scholarship inside a larger Southeast Asian conversation rather than letting it run in parallel."

"Indonesian AIS research has reached a point where we should not only be consuming frameworks developed elsewhere — we should be contributing cases, instruments, and theory that are useful to colleagues across ASEAN."

That ambition was visible in the paper sessions. A recurring theme was the gap between AIS textbook treatments — largely written from US and European corporate contexts — and the realities of Indonesian SMEs, family businesses, and Islamic finance institutions, which together account for a substantial share of the economy but receive comparatively little structured attention in mainstream AIS journals.

Doctoral consortium and early-career track

One of the more interesting components of the program was a half-day doctoral consortium held in parallel with the main paper sessions on the second day. Roughly a dozen PhD candidates presented work in progress on topics ranging from ERP adoption in regional government units to the use of process mining for internal audit. Discussants were drawn from both Indonesian senior faculty and one international visitor who chaired a feedback panel.

For early-career attendees, the symposium also functioned as an informal job market: the corridor conversations we observed touched on faculty openings at several Indonesian state universities, as well as PhD funding routes through LPDP and a couple of recently announced regional fellowships.

What we took away

Three impressions stayed with us after the symposium. First, AISINDO is consolidating as a serious scholarly community — programs are tighter, abstracts are more methodologically explicit, and the proportion of empirical work has grown relative to conceptual essays. Second, the chapter is positioning itself outward, not just inward; the next edition is expected to invite contributions in English alongside Bahasa Indonesia, and there is informal discussion of co-locating future doctoral consortia with neighboring AIS chapters. Third, the topical center of gravity is clearly shifting toward data-driven AIS — audit analytics, process mining, AI-assisted internal control — and away from system-design descriptions, which dominated earlier years.

The proceedings and program details are maintained on the chapter's own symposium site. A 2024 edition has been informally signalled by the chapter leadership, with a venue rotation to another Indonesian campus under discussion.

Filed from Surabaya. The author attended sessions on days one and two of the symposium.