Janice Burn
Janice Burn was appointed Foundation Chair of Information Systems (IS) at Edith Cowan University in Perth in 1997. She had previously held positions in Hong Kong, Canada and the United Kingdom. Her research interests centre on the strategic use of IS and its impact on organisational effectiveness in a wide variety of global contexts. She has published extensively in these areas and now enjoys a well-earned semi-retirement in the South of France, where she continues to supervise her doctoral students as a virtual professor.
Elsie S. K. Chan
Elsie Chan was born and brought up in the multicultural city of Hong Kong, so she was able to communicate and write fluently in English, Chinese and Putunghua. She started her career on her graduation from the Grantham College of Education, Hong Kong, in 1979 and has held various academic and administrative positions in a prestigious secondary school. She obtained her MSc degree in artificial intelligence at the University of Essex, United Kingdom, in 1989. Since then, she has been lecturing in various universities in Hong Kong, China and Macau, focusing on the development of the long-demanded open education in the region. Before her migration in 1994 to Melbourne, Australia, with her family, she registered as a PhD student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong but had to quit the research project due to her migration.
In Australia, she held various lecturing positions, mostly on a sessional basis, while continuing her research in information technology-related areas. Her achievements during the period were the establishment of closer links between international students and a building up of the relationship between Australian universities and universities in China. In early 2000, she was granted a PhD scholarship by Deakin University, Melbourne, so she decided to shift to a full-time mode of study. Her research focused mainly on e-commerce and education development and, during these years, she published a number of research papers. She also attended various conferences on e-commerce including the CollECTeR conference, which was a pioneer in the international e-commerce area. She completed her PhD degree in 2003 at Deakin University with the e-commerce and marketing integrated research topic of ‘New Educational Service Products: Tertiary EC/EB Education—the Asia-Pacific Region’.
In early 2004, she was appointed as IS lecturer in the School of Business and Informatics (Vic), Australian Catholic University, where she dedicated her efforts to the improvement of IS teaching. Since 2006, she has been Course Coordinator of Business Programs at the Australian Catholic University. She is currently supervising IS, business Honours and PhD students. Her continuing research interest is in electronic commerce/electronic business and IS education, web design, service quality and marketing.
Elsie Chan is also committed to the children’s section of an evangelical church in order to enhance religious education to youth in the community. As part of her continuous self-improvement effort, she is currently undertaking courses in Christian ministry training and a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education.
Roger Clarke
Roger Clarke is Principal of Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, Canberra. He is also a Visiting Professor in the E-Commerce Program at the University of Hong Kong, Visiting Professor in the Baker and McKenzie Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre at the University of New South Wales and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at The Australian National University. He holds Honours and Masters degrees in information systems (IS) from the University of New South Wales and a doctorate in IS from the ANU. Since the late 1980s, his focus has been on strategic and policy aspects of e-business, information infrastructure and ‘dataveillance’ and privacy.
He has been active in the IS profession and discipline since 1971. This has included 12 years each as a professional in Sydney, London and Zürich, as a senior academic at the ANU, and as a consultant based in Canberra. He has been a substantial contributor to the professional and academic literature, including some 80 refereed papers. He has also been active on conference committees in Australia and internationally, on editorial advisory boards and as an editor of proceedings and special issues.
During his time as an academic, he made significant contributions to the development of the IS discipline. He established the first directory of IS academics in Australia in 1988 (which was upgraded in 1991, merged with Guy Gable’s Asian directory in 1994 and absorbed into the world-wide online IS Faculty Directory in 1996). He was one of the founders of the ACIS Committee. He also established the ISWorld Australia page, and was Foundation AIS Councillor for the Asia-Pacific in 1994–95.
Using this breadth of experience, his personal archives and his knowledge of the people who have been active in IS, he was able to construct from scratch the first-ever history of the IS discipline in Australia.
Guy G. Gable
Guy Gable’s career is characterised by movement back and forth between university and practice. His early industry experience as programmer, analyst and systems development manager—and later as a consultant—underpins his need to ground research in practice. His PhD is from the University of Bradford (ICIS’92 1st) and his MBA from Ivey Business School. Post-MBA, he was senior information systems (IS) consultant with Arthur Young in Canada. In 1983, Gable migrated to Sydney to join Price Waterhouse. From 1986 to 1994, as Senior Fellow with the National University of Singapore, Gable was much influenced by Gordon Davis (NUS Distinguished Shaw Professor, 1985–87) and worked closely with notable colleagues K. K. Wei, Chee-Sing Yap and K. S. Raman. In 1994, he joined the School of Information Systems at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), where he is now Professor and Chair of the IT Professional Services Research Program. Since 2002, Gable has spent one month each year at the University of Hong Kong as Visiting Professor. He is Senior Editor (Pacific Asia Region) for JSIS, Associate Editor of MIS Quarterly and on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Information Systems Frontiers and Australasian Journal of Information Systems.
He has been at the forefront of Australian IS researchers via his continuing success with Australian Research Council (ARC) grants. He has been, since 1998, chief investigator on seven ARC collaborative grants (worth more than $3 million). He has published more than 100 refereed journal articles and conference papers and books. His research has involved mainly large, long-term projects in collaboration with practice—for example, National Computer Board (Singapore), Accenture (Australia and USA), SAP (Australia and corporate research), CUSC, Queensland Government and the Institute of Management Consultants. Key research interests include information technology (IT) professional services, IT research methods, enterprise systems and IT evaluation.
His successful collaboration with overseas head offices of large international corporations (for example, SAP, Accenture) has been notable. He brought to academia early recognition of the importance of package software and, in 1995, initiated one of the first programs of research and teaching in enterprise systems (ES/ERP). He cultured a collaborative relationship with SAP, which, under his direction, resulted in a contribution of more than $3 million from SAP, Digital and Sun Microsystems to establish at QUT the second international ES Application Hosting Centre. These early successes were undoubtedly influential in SAP’s decision in 2001 to create in Brisbane only their fifth corporate research node world-wide.
Guy Gable has represented Australian IS in the region. In 1993, he conducted a comprehensive survey of IS academics in Pacific Asia, convincing Roger Clarke to merge his nascent Australasian directory to form the Pacific Asia Directory of Information Systems Researchers, which in 1998 merged with ISWORLD Faculty Directory (http://www.isfacdir.org/). In 1997, Gable brought the Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) to Brisbane—its third running after Taiwan and Singapore—and initiated the first PACIS Doctoral Consortium. He was co-program chair of PACIS’97 and ACIS’00 with Ron Weber and Mike Vitale, co-doctoral consortium chair of PACIS’00 and PACIS’03 with Rutaro Manabe and K. K. Wei respectively, and has represented Australia to the PACIS executive since 1997. Championing this book and its related Communications of the Association for Information Systems (CAIS) and AJIS special issues has perhaps been among his largest contributions to the discipline in Australia and the region.
He has represented Australian IS internationally. He has been involved extensively in the Association for Information Systems (AIS), the main international IS body, including: 1) Nominations Committee, 1997; 2) National Secretary (Australia), 1996–97; 3) Bylaws Constitution Committee, 1997; 4) AIS Affiliated Organisations Committee, 1998; 5) AIS Region 3 Council Member, 1998; 6) Project Leader, 2003–06 AIS in Pacific Asia Region study; 7) Journal of the Association for Information Systems Editorial Board member, since 2002; 8) AIS Council nominee for AIS Presidency, 2006.
Shirley Gregor
Shirley Gregor has had a rather varied career, working across a number of different academic areas, in industry as well as academia, and in different geographical areas.
In her undergraduate science degree at the University of Queensland, she studied mathematics and psychology. On graduating, she had a change of direction and became a programmer-in-training (PIT) with the Australian government, based in Melbourne. The PIT scheme is quite famous in Australian information technology (IT) history and was a starting place for many IT professionals in the 1960s and 1970s. A not-quite facetious comment is that at that time the need for computing staff was so great that the government would take just about anybody! The government provided postgraduate training, which, for Shirley Gregor (née Eagles), was at the Bendigo College of Advanced Education. Stints working on the Brisbane City Council and then in IT positions in Glasgow and London followed. The consultancy firm of Datec Pty Ltd hired her in London in 1977 and paid for her to return to Australia to take up a position with its Brisbane office. This offer was a result of another period of shortages of IT staff in Australia, which meant overseas recruitment was in full swing. She benefited from a three-month bus trip across the Middle East and India as the passage home.
Another career change to motherhood followed, then a return to Rockhampton and the first step into academia as a part-time tutor—a position that could be combined with family duties. At this point, she began studying in earnest (for the first time really), and completed a Masters in Applied Science by research, and then a PhD in 1996 with Ron Weber as supervisor at the University of Queensland.
A number of her research interests grew out of her original interests in psychology and philosophy, which has led to work in artificial intelligence, knowledge-based systems and, more recently, the philosophy of technology. Her experience in industry has also led to a focus on the adoption and strategic use of IT in business. While in Rockhampton, she carried out a number of applied research projects with the beef industry and, since moving to Canberra, she has looked at IT in business more generally.
In 2001, she was appointed the Endowed Chair in Information Systems at The Australian National University, Canberra, where she heads the National Centre for Information Systems Research and is currently Head of the School of Accounting and Business Information Systems.
She has been successful in winning a number of Australian Research Council grants and other competitive grant income. Her publications include four edited books, 15 book chapters and more than 100 papers in conferences and journals such as MIS Quarterly, Journal of the Association of Information Systems, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, International Journal of Human Computer Studies, European Journal of Information Systems and Information Technology & People.
Shirley Gregor has contributed to the IT community in a number of ways, including as: inaugural President of the Australasian Association of Information Systems, 2002–03; Vice-President of the Australian Council of Professors and Heads of Information Systems; and, since 2007, Director of the Professional Standards Board, Australian Computer Society.
She was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday Honour’s list in June 2005. In 2005, she was also elected a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society.
Ernie Jordan
During his cadetship in industrial mathematics in the United Kingdom, Ernie Jordan gained his first experience of computing on a mainframe with 4 K of memory! On his graduation, the IBM/360 series beckoned and his career moved to commercial ‘data processing’ from mathematical and statistical applications. It was not long before the COBOL world palled and he returned to university (in Wales) for postgraduate statistics and then his first academic position, in Coventry (UK). Australia made the tragic mistake of accepting him as a migrant so he sailed into Sydney and took up a lecturing position in statistics in Central Queensland.
Four years later, he moved to Sydney to work as an accounts manager with a major computer services organisation that provided state-of-the-art application services to local, national and international companies. He then established his own business developing customised applications on mid-range systems for small and medium enterprises in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales. He returned to the academic world as a lecturer in systems analysis and design in Newcastle, where he discovered that what he had regarded as the ‘secret art’ of systems analysis had been fashioned into theoretical frameworks and even textbooks.
A major career transition occurred when he took up a position with City University (then Polytechnic) of Hong Kong. He found an inspiring doctoral supervisor (Bob Tricker at the University of Hong Kong) for his thesis in information systems (IS) strategy. The rapidly expanding City University also threw up many opportunities for leadership in academic development within a new department of IS and the first degree in IS in Hong Kong.
At that time, he specialised in the area of strategic application of information technology (IT), which became concerned increasingly with electronic commerce. He developed and led Macquarie Graduate School of Management (MGSM) electronic commerce degree programs.
Some eight years ago, he carried out research that examined the reluctance of organisations in Australia to develop formal business continuity plans, which led to a more general concern about the risks that IT posed for organisations. For many organisations, that concern finds its way to senior management and board members under the heading of IT governance, which figured strongly in his recent book, Beating IT risks—now translated into Finnish and Mandarin.
During the past 10 years, he has had a significant presence within the MGSM, playing key roles in the development of the Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) degree and in the development of a strong research supervision practice within the school. He has supervised some 12 doctoral students to completion during this time. He recently moved from being Director of Higher Degrees Research (HDR) at MGSM to being Director of HDR Marketing and Development with Macquarie International, the international recruitment and partnering arm of Macquarie University.
Andy Koronios
Andy Koronios is the head of the School of Computer and Information Science, in the Division of Information Technology, Engineering and the Environment at the University of South Australia. Andy has degrees in electrical engineering, computing and education and a PhD from the University of Queensland.
Andy has extensive experience in commercial and academic environments and has interests in electronic commerce, information quality, computer security, strategic information management, multimedia systems as well as online learning technologies. He has worked as a consultant as well as a professional speaker on information technology (IT) issues in Australia and South-East Asia.
He has more than 20 years’ experience in the academic environment and has received the University of Southern Queensland Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Andy Koronios has established two university research labs and a funded centre. He is currently research program leader of a federally funded centre for system integration in engineering asset management and has attracted more than $2 million in research funding.
He has published 10 books and several chapters as well as numerous research papers in diverse areas such as information security, data quality, electronic commerce, multimedia and online learning.
Edward Lewis
Edward Lewis was professionally educated as a behavioural scientist, with more than 20 years’ experience in personnel and information systems (IS) planning. He served in the Australian Army as an infantry officer and as a psychologist, working in personnel research and information technology (IT) policy. Ed has also worked in the Australian Public Service, encouraging the use of IT by business, and as a marketing manager for a large international computer company (now defunct but not because of him).
He has carried out considerable research into the development of aids for decision making, resulting in the ‘Select!Gain’ and the ‘Risk–Remedy’ methods that have been adopted by many government agencies for tender evaluation. More recently, he has developed the ‘Analysis of networks of Links’ (AnnL) tool for systems planning, performance measurement and policy production.
He has presented more than 30 short courses about planning to national and international groups, primarily in the public sector. He has undertaken more than 40 consultancy projects for public and international private-sector organisations, including: ICT governance reviews; strategic planning; business cases; risk management; evaluation of more than 20 tenders; performance measurement; information management policies; and enterprise architecture.
Edward Lewis is the current chair of the IT-030 Committee preparing the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Management and Governance Standards for Standards Australia.
Chad Lin
Chad Lin is a Research Fellow at Curtin University of Technology, Australia. In the past few years, he has conducted extensive research in the areas of: information systems (IS) and information technology (IT) investment evaluation and benefits realisation, IS/IT outsourcing, e-commerce, virtual teams, e-health, radio frequency identification technology (RFID) and strategic alliances. He has written and published almost 100 internationally refereed journal articles (for example, for Information and Management, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, European Journal of Information Systems, Information Technology and People, Industrial Management and Data Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science and Journal of Research and Practice in IT) and conference papers as well as book chapters. He has also served as a member of editorial review boards for several prestigious international journals.
Craig McDonald
Craig McDonald, PhD FACS, is Associate Professor of Information Systems (IS) at the University of Canberra. For nearly four decades, he has been developing, teaching, researching and consulting for projects for the creation of systems that embody data, information and knowledge. These systems have been effective in the public service, non-governmental organisations, private enterprise and in research organisations.
His continuing research work is in the foundations of the informatics field (especially semantics, modelling and ontologies, and information ethics) and in the responsible application of informatics to the domains of government, health, education and research.
Current research projects include the development of a pragmatic approach to concept analysis and its testing in a semantic analysis of drug intervention policies to reveal the conceptual structure of the illicit drug system (e-health), the incorporation of ethics into project management teaching (e-education), the nature of board-level IS (e-governance) and the human activity systems aspect of e-research. He holds external and internal research grants and has published widely in journals, conferences and books.
His academic experience includes four years at the University of Technology, Sydney, 11 years at Charles Sturt University and seven years at the University of Canberra. He has been visiting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and twice a visiting fellow at The Australian National University. His teaching experience ranges from technology-based topics such as database and programming to the organisational impacts of systems and information ethics. He currently teaches research proposals and methods, project management and ethics. He supervises PhD and Masters candidates.
He had 16 years in industry before becoming an academic and has maintained a consultancy role. He spent most of the 1990s in technology-based knowledge representation and transfer with the Cooperative Research Centre for Viticulture in managing the development of the ‘AusVit’ system. He is active in university management and governance, holding the roles of Head of School, the elected academic on the University of Canberra Council, member of the academic board and member of various committees including Information Management and Systems and Academic Workloads.
Craig McDonald is Editor-in-Chief of the Australasian Journal of Information Systems, a member of the executive of the Australian Council of Professors and Heads of Information Systems (ACPHIS), an Australian Research Council ‘expert of international standing’ in IS and is head of the IS discipline at the University of Canberra.
Graham Pervan
Graham Pervan is Dean, Research and Development, at Curtin Business School, and has been a professor in information systems (IS) at Curtin University of Technology since 1996. Graham has a number of research and teaching interests including information technology (IT) adoption and management, IT and business process outsourcing and offshoring, measuring and realising the benefits of IT, the foundations of decision support systems, group support systems and other collaboration technologies. Graham has maintained links with practice as an IT consultant and facilitator.
He began his academic career in 1973 at the West Australian Institute of Technology in Perth. He has held a variety of senior roles, including five years as head of school. Graham has developed and taught programs at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels and in many IS topics, including research methods for Honours, Masters and PhD students in IS. He is also the external assessor for the Master of Information Management program at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has successfully supervised eight PhD students to completion and currently has six PhD students.
He has been involved actively with the Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS), having first presented a paper at ACIS in 1992. He was program chair of ACIS 1995 at Curtin University of Technology, Doctoral Consortium chair of ACIS 2003 and presented many papers and panel sessions in the years since, as well as serving on many doctoral consortia. He is a strong supporter of Australian IS/IT journals, having published 10 papers in the Australian (now Australasian) Journal of Information Systems and the Australian Computer Journal (now Journal for Research and Practice in Information Technology), and serving as a reviewer for both.
Graham Pervan completed a PhD in IS in 1993 and has since focused strongly on research. He is the Asia-Pacific Editor for the Journal of Information Technology and the IT Management Editor for the Australian Journal of Management. He has reviewed papers for most major journals and conferences. He has published the outcomes of his research in more than 150 refereed journal and conference papers in outlets including the Journal of Information Technology, Information and Management, International Journal of Medical Informatics, Decision Support Systems, Journal of Computer Information Systems and the Journal of Group Decision and Negotiation.
He has received more than $500,000 in research funding from the Australian Research Council and various industry and other sources. Since 2000, he has been the President of the Australian Council of Professors and Heads of Information Systems, the premier body for IS academics in Australia.
Carol E. Pollard
Equally at home in the southern and northern hemispheres, Carol Pollard has taught in three different countries on two continents in two hemispheres during her 14- year academic career. Her PhD and MBA are from the University of Pittsburgh, USA, where she was fortunate to be advised by William King, one of the founding fathers of the information systems (IS) discipline. In 1991, her first academic appointment took her ‘north of the border’ to Canada, where she was appointed to the IS department in the Faculty of Management at the University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. As she progressed from assistant professor to associate professor, her skills as a manager and an innovator were evident in her involvement with the development and inaugural delivery of a creative MBA degree that included team teaching, innovative industry projects and ‘quick-hit’ projects offered to small businesses in the area. In 1996, she relocated to the United States for a short stint at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she lead the recruitment of IS majors in the Leeds College of Business by delivering the introductory IS course to as many as 500 undergraduates and directing 12–15 teaching assistants per semester.
She moved to Australia in January 2000 to take up a position in the School of Information Systems, University of Tasmania, at the Hobart campus. During her six years there, she served as Assistant Head of School for four years and Head of School for one—before her departure in December 2005. In addition, she worked hard to enhance the research culture of the School of Information Systems through her supervision of a large number of research students at the Honours, Masters and PhD levels, and as Postgraduate Research Coordinator and Masters Program Coordinator. In these roles, she was able to introduce a more positivist approach to the research program by teaching and using quantitative methods and mixed methodology research into the previously exclusively interpretivist, qualitative research culture. She also became heavily involved in the Australian IS community during her time at the University of Tasmania. She represented Australian IS regionally and nationally at conferences (PACIS, ACIS, AMCIS, GITMA) and, in December 2004, she organised the Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS) in Hobart, Tasmania. She also served on the ACIS Executive Committee and has served as a member of the Australian Council of Professors and Heads of Information Systems (ACPHIS) since 2004.
Her research interests include business/information technology (IT) alignment, the impact of emerging information and communications technology (ICT) and technology transfer. Her current research focuses on small to medium-sized firms. She has published in MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems and Information and Management. She has presented her research at numerous national and international conferences. Her global influence in the IS field extends from her involvement with the premier information systems conference, ICIS, as its Executive Secretary from 1995 to 1999 to her appointment in 2004 as an international expert assessor for the Australian Research Council. Since January 2006, she has been Associate Professor of Information Systems and Research Director, Center for Applied Research on Emerging Technologies (CARET), at the Appalachian State University, where she enjoys a close proximity to her two sons and their families. She is also Vice-President, International, of the Global Information Technology Association World Conference (GITMA); past chair, ACIS Executive Committee; and an Advisory Board member of Teradata University Network. Her continuing interest in the Australian IS community motivated her to be involved in this study project and she continues to be a loyal supporter of the Australian IS community.
Gail Ridley
Gail Ridley works as a Senior Lecturer at the School of Accounting and Corporate Governance within the Faculty of Business, at the University of Tasmania. Before working at this school, she was a staff member of the School of Information Systems at the same university.
Her first career was in teaching, where she worked in classroom and senior positions in teaching services within and outside Australia. Much of the classroom work was with students using English as a second language. After completing a Graduate Diploma in Science (Information Technology) at the School of Information Systems at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, she started work as an academic. In 2000, she completed a PhD at the same school, looking at the development of the information systems (IS) discipline in Australia and the use of different research methods. Her involvement in the current volume came about as a result of the topic of her doctoral thesis.
Most of her approximately 30 refereed journal and conference papers have examined research methods, information technology (IT) governance and IT control. She was one of the first academics to see the potential of the ‘Control Objectives for Information and related Technology’ (COBIT) framework for helping organisations to use IT to achieve their business goals. Having been ‘COBITised’ some years ago, much of her more recent research interests have had a link to COBIT. The IT control and COBIT journey has been a fascinating one, providing her with research settings that have ranged from IT audit in government audit offices to counter-terrorism in the Department of Defence. The background in IT control and IT audit gave her the opportunity to move to her present school.
An interest in textual analysis has led her to use different forms of the content-analysis method in her research. Content analysis has also been used in her contribution to this volume.
Gail Ridley's first career in teaching has manifested itself in the university environment in the rewards she has gained from working with students, and particularly her involvement in supervision of research students. She has been privileged to work with a series of highly able and motivated research students, most notably international students from countries including China and Thailand.
Graeme Shanks
Graeme Shanks is a Professorial Fellow in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. Until recently, he was Associate Dean of Research and Professor in the School of Business Systems in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, Australia. Before becoming an academic, he worked for a number of years as a programmer, programmer-analyst and project leader in several large organisations. He has a number of research and teaching interests, including conceptual modelling, data quality, identity management and the implementation and impact of enterprise systems and inter-organisational systems.
He began his academic career in 1982 at the Chisholm Institute of Technology in Melbourne. He was course leader for graduate programs in information technology (IT) and helped to develop the first Australian course-work Masters degree in IT in the mid-1980s. Many years later, he led the restructuring of the Master of Information Systems program at the University of Melbourne. For many years, he has developed subjects in the areas of data management, systems analysis, conceptual modelling, enterprise systems and data warehousing. He has published several papers on curriculum development in these areas. He has successfully supervised eight PhD students to completion.
He has been involved actively with the Australian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS), having presented a paper at the first ACIS in 1990; he was Program Chair of ACIS 1994, at Monash University, and has presented many papers and panel sessions in the years since. At the 1994 conference—together with others including David Arnott, Graham Pervan, Bernie Glasson and Rudi Hirschheim—he helped to devise the ‘Evolving Charter’ for ACIS, which defines the governance and operation of the conference series. He was Executive Officer of ACIS for several years, helping to ensure the successful operation of the ACIS conference series. He has been an active member of the Australian Computer Society for many years and was elected a Fellow in 1999. He also served on the Committee of the Data Management Association. He has been a member of the Australian Council of Professors and Heads of Information Systems (ACPHIS) for many years.
Graeme Shanks completed a PhD in information systems (IS) in 1997 and has since focused strongly on research. He is a member of several editorial boards, including Asia Pacific Management Review (Regional Editor), Journal of Knowledge Management Theory and Practice, Data Warehousing Journal, International Journal of Data Warehousing and Mining, Journal of Database Management and the New Zealand Journal of Applied Computing and Information Technology. He has published the outcomes of his research in more than 120 refereed journal and conference papers in outlets including Information Systems Journal, Journal of Information Technology, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Communications of the ACM and the International Conference on Information Systems.
He has received more than $1 million in research funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), including Discovery grants and industry linkage grants. He was a member of the ARC College of Experts from 2004 to 2005, representing the IS community. He has presented seminars on ARC grant schemes throughout Australia and at the annual ACPHIS workshops.
Bob Smyth
Bob Smyth is currently a Research Associate within the Information Technology Professional Services Research Program at Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
After a short career as a high school maths teacher, in January 1969, he joined IBM in its Brisbane Service Bureau, where he worked as a systems analyst. In August 1972, he started as a lecturer in data processing in the Department of Management at Queensland Institute of Technology (QIT). In 1978, after completing a graduate diploma in information processing at the University of Queensland and an MSc at Aston University, he was appointed head of the data-processing section in the School of Business Studies at QIT.
During these formative years of information systems (IS) in Australian tertiary education, QIT had a prominent place—a status maintained after 1989 when QIT became the QUT. It should be said that these early developments of IS at QIT took place in the context of passive resistance from Queensland’s Board of Advanced Education, which sought to limit perceived challenges to the domain of existing universities. In 1980, he introduced QIT’s first stand-alone postgraduate IS course, a Graduate Diploma in Commercial Computing. He also had some small influence on the development of IS in other colleges of advanced education (CAEs) in the region, serving on advisory committees at Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education, Capricornia Institute of Advanced Education and Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education. He was also an advisor in business computing to Darwin Community College (the predecessor to Charles Darwin University), and a long-time member of IT advisory committees to the Queensland Board of Senior Secondary School Studies.
His career in IS at QIT/QUT has been a long one. In 1989, he was awarded QUT’s inaugural Award for Distinguished Academic Service ‘for outstanding teaching and his contribution to major curriculum development in information systems’. Only later did he become involved in formal IS research, although he had regularly contributed papers to the CAE Computing Conferences. He completed his PhD at QUT at the end of 2001. In 2002, he retired from his position as Assistant Dean (Postgraduate) in the Faculty of Information Technology at QUT, returning to QUT later to work part-time in research in the School of Information Systems. His main research interests include IT professional services, computer-aided software engineering and enterprise systems. He has a particular interest in the case-study method. In his recent role as research associate, he has been involved heavily in the guidance of PhD candidates in IS.
Craig Standing
Craig Standing is Professor of Strategic Information Management in the School of Management at Edith Cowan University. He is currently Director of the Web Research Centre and was previously head of the School of Management Information Systems at Edith Cowan University. Craig’s work has focused on the adoption and use of electronic markets and he has obtained funding from several sources to support this work, much of which has involved partners from industry. He has also been involved in the adoption of mobile services through his collaboration with academics from Finland. His work has appeared in journals such as Information and Management, Information and Organization, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, European Journal of Information Systems and the International Journal of Electronic Commerce.
He is Chief Editor of the Journal of Systems and Information Technology (Emerald) and, along with his co-author, Steve Benson, is the author of a widely adopted foundation text for information systems (IS) courses (published by Wiley). This textbook is now in its third edition. Craig is particularly keen on doctoral supervision and has won several awards for the quality of his supervision.
Paula Swatman
Paula Swatman currently has a double role—first as the Inaugural State Records of South Australia/Fuji Xerox/State Library of South Australia Professor of Business Information Management (BIM) at the University of South Australia. In a world first, this chair was created to develop leading-edge teaching programs that would link the hitherto separate areas of: information management, library studies, records management, archival management, information and communications technology (ICT) and business management.
Her second role is as the continuing Professor of Information Systems (IS) within the School of Computer and Information Science at the University of South Australia. She has significant academic and industry experience—as well as research and teaching interests—in the areas of e-business and e-commerce and many of the newer extensions of this area (such as m-commerce, e-health and e-learning). She spent more than 10 years working in the banking and information technology (IT) industries and developing her interest in e-commerce before returning to academic life in the late 1980s.
Her background lies in the areas of IS and electronic business. Her specialised interests are in the strategic use of e-commerce and e-business; the creation and diffusion of e-business models; the use and application of standards; the evolution of the digital content sector; e-markets and supply chain management; rural telecommunications and the impact of m-commerce on rural Australia; the implications of the World Wide Web and the online economy; and e-learning and education in the ‘New Economy’. She returned to Australia at the start of 2004 after three years in Germany as Professor of E-Business and Foundation Director of the Institute for Management at the University of Koblenz-Landau, where she was responsible for setting up and managing the new, Bologna-style BSc and MSc degrees in information management. She won and managed a fifth framework European Commission research grant in the development of new business models for digital content during her time in Germany and, as an adjunct professor, remains involved in research and teaching activities at the University of Koblenz-Landau.
She is active in the program committees of a wide variety of e-commerce and IS conferences, and is also a member of the editorial board of a number of e-commerce and IS journals. As one of the founding members of the CollECTeR e-commerce into universities research group, she organises annual conferences and has managed a number of major research consultation projects for the group.
Jim Underwood
Jim Underwood is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Systems within the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).
Born in Sydney, he began his academic career with an Honours degree in (very) pure mathematics at the University of New South Wales. He continued with tutoring and pursuing a PhD, but a feeling that he was learning more and more about less and less, the realisation that advances in mathematics were starting to depend on how big a computer you had and a belated discovery of the social aspects of university life necessitated a change of direction.
After one term of attempting to teach abstract mathematics to 14-year-old girls who couldn’t wait to leave school for the check-out, he moved to English-Electric-Leo-Marconi (later subsumed by ICL), where he was taught to be an analyst programmer and learned about corporate restructuring, communicating with users and the joys of being attached to non-market-dominant technology (he is now a Mac user). This was followed by a happy and successful year with a small start-up consulting company. Nevertheless, disillusion with the ordinariness of most computer applications led to a return to the tertiary sector and another start-up: the computing course at Canberra Collage of Advanced Education, presided over by the incomparable Digby Pridmore. The course catered mainly to the needs of the Commonwealth Public Service and was deliberately labelled Bachelor of Arts in Computing because ‘computing wasn’t a science’. This was a time of optimism that computing could help promote equality in society. After 18 years, Canberra began to pall and he moved to UTS. This was a much ‘harder’ computer science environment, so old issues needed to be revisited.
In both these institutions, he was quite involved in administration and course development, and for several periods led the information systems (IS) group.
His academic life has centred on an inevitably fruitless search for a theoretical basis for the practice and teaching of systems analysis, design and development. His political philosophy required that models should be participative and non-hierarchical. Initial investigations involved information theory, control theory and general systems theory, with reference to the work of Ashby, Beer, von Bertalanffy and Emery. The problem that became apparent in the literature was a tendency to apply simplified mathematical or technological models in situations in which no data were available. The need to get focus out of the machine and onto the users and their ‘problem’ led to more social theories, such as Argyris’s organisational learning and Jung’s archetypes. On his second attempt at a PhD (finished in 2001), He discovered ‘Actor-Network Theory’ (ANT), which had the advantage of giving practical guidance to investigations without worrying too much about truth claims. For an understanding of IS development, ANT did need a few additions: Foucault provided a model of intersecting meanings and Deleuze suggested a dynamic for the trajectory of such intersections.
As a result of his complex journey, Jim Underwood, among IS researchers, has one of the widest repertoires of models for applying to real situations of information technology (IT) use, and is one of the least embarrassed at switching models as necessary. This is valuable in communicating with practitioners, understanding a wide variety of IS research and supervising students with diverse interests. Nevertheless, as his career reaches maturity, he is disappointed to see the resurrection of hierarchy and bureaucracy, the business dominance of IT research and the continual pressure to push the meanings of information, knowledge, process, interaction and even satisfaction back into the machine.
David Wilson
Associate Professor David Wilson has teaching and research interests in software quality assurance, software process improvement, project management and information systems (IS) management.
His research collaboration with Tracy Hall of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire spans 10 years. This research focuses on identifying practitioners’ attitudes towards software quality and process improvement, determining how these attitudes affect behaviour within the quality process and establishing how that behaviour affects software quality and process improvement. The overall aim is to develop generic strategies and guidelines that organisations can use to improve software quality and software processes by managing software practitioners more effectively within the quality improvement process. Further information is available at http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~pppgroup/
His research collaboration with David Avison of ESSEC in France spans more than 10 years. This research focuses on IS management issues, particularly the people and cultural aspects of information technology failure.