Information Systems Development : Towards a Service Provision Society This volume of Information System Development Towards a Service Provision Society is the published proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Systems Development (ISD2008) that was hosted by the Department of Computer Science of the University of Cyprus at the Annabelle Hotel Paphos Cyprus from August 25 27 2008. The theme of the conference was Towards a Service Provision Society . In total 131 delegates from 34 different countries registered for the conference making it a truly international event. Papers presented at the conference strongly reflected the conference theme. Of 165 papers submitted 99 were presented at the conference representing an acceptance rate of approximately 60%. All papers were peer reviewed by three or four referees (a total of 543 review reports were submitted corresponding to an average of 3.29 reviews per paper). Over the course of three days 28 paper sessions were held covering a range of areas such as: Information Systems Engineering Management Business Systems Analysis Design Intelligent Information Systems Agile and High Speed Systems Development Methods Enterprise Systems Development Adoption Public Information Systems Development Information Systems Development Education Information Systems Development in Developing Nations Legal and Administrative Aspects of Information Systems Development Information Systems Research Methodologies Service Oriented Analysis and Design of Information Systems IT Service Management Philosophical and Theoretical Issues in Information Systems Development Model driven Engineering in ISD Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in Information Systems Development . The book is organised by order of the conference sessions. While all the presented papers were of high quality we have selected two of them to share the Best Paper Award. The first one is: Modeling the contribution of enterprise architecture practice to the achievement of business goals by Marlies van Steenbergen Sjaak Brinkkemper. The second one is: Why cant we bet on ISD Outcomes: ISD Form as a Predictor of Success by Mike Newman Shan L Pan Gary Pan. Furthermore to acknowledge the quality of the reviews he completed the quality of the paper he submitted his role as a track and session chair and his general participation in the conference we have awarded an Ovreall Contribution Award to Michael Lang of the National University of Ireland Galway. Details of these awards can be found on the conference Web site at http: isd2008.cs.ucy.ac.cy. Our gratitude is extended firstly to all those who attended and authored work for the conference. The contribution of the International Program Committee was invaluable in identifying track chairs and reviewers to commit to doing vital work. While volunteering to host a conference is a highly personal undertaking without support it would be impossible. Thus we wish to thank our sponsors for their financial support and other aid. The ISD conference community has developed over the years a real sense of collegiality and friendliness perhaps unusually so for a conference. At the same time it has been a stimulating forum where a free exchange of views and perspectives is encouraged. Perhaps what brings the community together is a belief that the process of systems development is important whether it is systematic or structured or improvised or spontaneous there is something about the process and the outcomes that excites us. We form a spectrum of thought from those who see the activity as somewhat scientific to others that see it as wholly sociological we span a divide between abstract and conceptual to hard code and artefacts somewhere in between lies the truth. If our work is to make a meaningful contribution to both practice (by teaching students) and research (by sharing our experiences and studies with others) then hopefully this conference will have done a little of the former and much for the latter. This volume constitutes the published proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Systems Development. They present the latest and greatest concepts approaches and techniques of systems development a notoriously transitional field.