Dear Colleagues:

 

Just after we had given final approval to the publisher for articles that will appear in this month's issue, we were saddened to read in Lorne Olfman's post to AISWORLD (dated May 5) that Paul Gray (who, in addition to being a leading light of our field is one of our authors this month) and his wife Muriel had recently been involved in a serious automobile accident. We were relieved to read further that they had both survived the accident, albeit with serious injuries. We offer our best wishes for a full and rapid recovery to them both.

 

We are pleased to announce the May, 2012 (Volume 43, Number 2) issue of The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems.   While we do not recruit for "special issues", sometimes they emerge in the course of events. This issue is an example. After learning we were taking over the journal, one of the first content areas that we identified was to look at our field from the perspective of different stakeholders with an interest in our discipline. To this end, one of the viewpoints that we are interested in understanding is how business school deans view our field. As of this writing, there are at least a few Business School Deans that come from the IS discipline, and some of these were able to take time from their busy schedules and offer their insights on how the IS discipline is seen as contributing (or not) to the advancement of the business school mission.

Our invitation welcomed a range of perspectives; both supportive and critical of how the IS discipline fulfills its role in the business school. Given their day jobs, finding Deans that were willing and able to find the time was not an easy task. However, we were able to secure essays from four Deans who were able to find the time to participate: Michael Ginzberg of American University, Len Jessup of the University of Arizona, Mohan Tanniru of Oakland University, and Peter Todd of McGill University. We anticipated that we would receive insightful commentary and our essayists have not disappointed.

 

After collecting the Deans essays, we invited two AIS Leo Award winners, Blake Ives (with Dennis Adams) and Paul Gray to offer additional commentary given the issues the Deans have raised. What we hope to engender with this initiative is an honest discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of our field, and how we can make the value we all see in it more obvious to those entities we need to influence.

 

We believe that this issue will initiate a new debate on the value of the IS field within the broader academic community and we urge you to pick up a copy and read these insightful essays.  After you have finished reading this issue, bring your thoughts with you to AMCIS in Seattle, where we will be hosting a panel of IS deans (scheduled for Saturday, August 11, 2012 at 1:30 PM). The panel there is slated to consist of John Mooney (Pepperdine), Peter Todd (Dean, McGill), Len Jessup (Dean, Arizona), Mark Fuller (Dean, Massachusetts), Bill Hardgrave (Dean, Auburn), Andy Schwarz (LSU) and Dave Salisbury (Dayton). We hope that the essays and commentary we present here will help generate ideas for discussion at the panel in Seattle.

 

While this issue consists of solely invited pieces on this topic, we wish to remind the field that we still invite you to submit your best empirical work to be included within our pages. We believe that invited pieces such as you see in this issue will help draw eyes to the journal, and thereby also to the excellent empirical work you will provide.

 

In our previous issue, we noted that we had put together a really great editorial team. Matti Rossi of Aalto University is one of them. However, he turned out to be so great that he was recently named Editor-in-Chief of The Communications of the AIS, so he will be stepping away to engage fully in that role. We thank Matti for his service, and wish him well in his new endeavor.

 

Finally, we'd like to take this opportunity to remind our colleagues that SIGMIS membership costs $29 per year ($19 for students) and includes a subscription to The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems. The link below may be used to sign up.  (https://campus.acm.org/public/gensigqj/gensigqj_control.cfm?promo=QJSIG&offering=004&form_type=SIG).

 

We hope you find this issue to be engaging. Thanks for your time and attention.

 

Andy Schwarz and Dave Salisbury.

 

 

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Dr. Andrew Schwarz
Associate Professor, Information Systems

Milton J. Womack Developing Scholar

Francis M. Coates MBA Professor

Louisiana State University

E. J. Ouro College of Business

 

Editor-in-Chief, The Data Base for ADVANCES IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS (http://www.sigmis.org/DataBase.html)

 

Vice President of Technology, Association for Information Systems

 

Academic Coordinator for Online Graduate Programs (MBA)

 

Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/drandrewschwarz

Skype: andyhsphd

Text: 225.267.7216
Phone: 225.578.9075
Fax: 225.578.2511
aschwarz@lsu.edu
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