The annual International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) is the most prestigious gathering of I/S academics and research-oriented practitioners in the world. Every year its 45 or so papers and panel presentations are selected from over 200 submissions, and the ICIS Proceedings, available on CD-ROM through 2000, are in the permanent collections of libraries throughout the world.

ICIS refers both to the annual International Conference on Information Systems, and to an ever changing volunteer group that organizes the conference. ICIS merged in 2000 to become a conference of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and is associated with: the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the International Academy for Information Managment (IAIM), the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS), and the Society for Information Management (SIM).

The Conference activities are primarily delivered by and for academics, though many of the papers and panels have a strong professional orientation.

ICIS was founded in 1980 at UCLA and the first conference was held at the University of Pennsylvania as the " Conference on Information Systems". By 1986, particularly as the result of Canadian and European attendance and participation, " International" was appended to the name creating the International Conference on Information Systems. ICIS became truly international in 1990 when the conference was first held outside North America in Copenhagen, Denmark. ICIS further established its international credentials by holding ICIS'95 in Amsterdam, ICIS'98 in Helsinki and ICIS'00 in Brisbane. ICIS'96 featured the inaugural ISWorld Net Challenge Award.

Accompanying this international attendance has been the development of a Program Committee which reflects this worldwide participation. Committees in recent years have included members from countries and cultures as varied as Mexico, Finland, Israel, South Africa, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan.