New and Noteworthy

Once again the CIS Department graduate program is ranked as one of the nine best in the nation. For public universities, the CIS Department ranked fifth. According to the US News & World Report, for the third consecutive year, the MIS program was rated as one of the ten best in the United States. continued

Robinson Wins Highly Competitive NSF Grant

Bill Robinson received a highly competitive National Science Foundation grant of $246,498 for support of his project entitled: �Monitoring in Support of Design Science Principles.� Congratulations, Bill !!! continued

CIS Department hosted the 2007 CIO Executive Summit in December 2007

Again for this year, Robinson College�s CIS department is the host organization for the CIO Executive Summit, the premier gathering of corporate chief information officers (CIOs) and senior IT executives from through the southeast. The CIO Executive Summit is a national network of private, peer-to-peer conferences designed to provide a collaborative forum for the top CIOs in each of their respective regions. The one-day conference is by invitation only and is guided by a Governing Body of IT leaders from Fortune 1000 companies and other leading organizations. The Robinson College and the CIS Department were chosen as the host organization because of their international reputation in research, education, and practice.

Free Books for Our Students
Ok, its old news, but our graduating seniors didn't think we did enough to publicize in our classes the ebooks program at the library. Its a valuable resource available to GSU students: Books 24x7 (available through the Pullen Library website). The link to the ebooks page is http://www.library.gsu.edu/ebooks/. Books 24x7 is available off campus using the school's proxy server... all students need are their "barcode" number (on their school ID card) and their last name to access the books from home. Books are available for online viewing only and the books themselves cannot be printed. Content from CDs included with the "real" books is also available in most cases.

The site has a WIDE selection of technical books from "publishers such as MIT Press, O'Reilly, Osborne/McGraw-Hill, Que, Sams, Sybex and Wiley." Michael England, one of our soon-to-be alumni, says "I've been able to access these resources for FREE... in the past I've had to purchase similar books at $30-70 each! If this information could be disseminated to the students and faculty, I think it would be very valuable!"

Best Selling Author?
You bet. Mark Keil's article (together with Ramiro Montealegre) made the best seller list for Sloan Management Review reprints. Indeed it ranked second in their top-ten best sellers for the academic market. The article, "Cutting your losses: Extricating your organization when a big project goes awry," was published in Vol. 41, No. 3, Spring 2000, pp. 55-68. In addition, This article was translated into German and republished in Harvard Business Manager in June 2000.

CIS Grows to Four Labs
The department has won funding for three proposals to expand the technology support for students in our classes. Rod Padilla led a successful proposal for funding for our Active Learning Classroom for CIS (CS100), 95,100, helped by Roy Johnson and Therese Viscelli. Carl Stucke was successful in further funding the CIS Student Security Lab funded for 16,996. Rod was also successful in proposing the CIS Student Computing Virtual Laboratory funded for 115,082, helped by Vijay Vaishnavi and Bala Ramesh. This success expands CIS to four labs: The Brainlab, the security lab, the virtual lab, and the Learning Classroom.

The impact of the Active Learning Classroom will be a 55-seat student-workstation-equipped classroom for which CIS has priority, and enables large classes like our CIS 2010 to operate with student workstations during classes. The impact of the virtual lab is our ability to create a special purpose CIS lab in any classroom equipped with student workstations, running such limited license software as SAS Dataminer, Groupsystems, and Rational.

Second CIS'er Chalks up SREB Scholarship
Nannette Napier has joined Adrianne Davis by winning a Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) scholarship. This prestigious award has been won in a wide regional competition across the southern part of the US. Congratulations Nannette

Vaishnavi's Design Research Page Goes On-Line
Vijay's ISWorld design research is now linked to the ISWorld home page under Research Methods! Please visit the site:

http://isworld.org/Researchdesign/drisISworld.htm

The page shows Georgia State University and University of Nevada, Reno as sponsors. More fame, kudos and GSU leadership in the CIS field.

CIS Offers Georgia Pacific Offshoring Seminar
Drs. Ramesh and Baskerville presented to a group of execs the preliminary results of research that align principles from agile software development, knowledge economics, and offshoring capability. The goodwill seminar was offered as part of GaPac's membership in our affiliates program and was strongly applauded by the participants (which included CIO James Dallas). We are continuing to press forward with a fledgling faculty internship program with this company.

Saif Al Shaki Gift to the Department
One of our alumni has donated to the department a lovely gift of a King's silver display plaque in appreciation for his great instruction! The plaque is on display in Dr. Mark Keil's office.

McDonald Joins Microsoft Advisory Board
Dr. Dave McDonald is one of sixteen national faculty chosen by Microsoft as a member of the Microsoft Academic Advisory Board! This appointment is significant for the department given the large number of computer science and information systems departments that are affected by the recommendations of the board. The board's purpose is to help define the direction Microsoft will take in the Academic marketplace in the years to come.

Vaishnavi Elected Treasurer of WITS
Congratulations to Vijay on his election to a three-year term as treasurer of WITS from January 1, 2004 through December 31, 2006. The other executive officers will include President Carson Woo and Vice President/Secretary Amit Basu. WITS (Workshop on Information Technologies & Systems) is annually organized to promote discussion and interaction among researchers and practitioners interested in the development and utilization of cutting-edge Information Technologies and Systems. It includes paper presentations, panel sessions, tutorials, industry sessions, and technology demonstrations. Presented papers are published in a proceedings distributed at the workshop. Selected WITS papers are solicited for journal publication.

EJIS Finds a New �Co-home� at GSU
The Operations Research Society has announced that our Richard Baskerville will join Ray Paul and Bob O�Keefe as co-editor of EJIS. The journal, published in cooperation with Palgrave, has been ranked in some surveys just under MISQ and ISR in terms of quality IS journals. Richard applauds the dedication of his co-editors toward moving EJIS forward toward equal footing with these other top journals in quality and ranking.

Speaker�s Bureau Enlivening CIS Classes
Adrianne Davis shares her delight at having John Lhota (a visitor arranged for her by Dr. McDonald) join her CIS 2010 class. John spoke with students �about the myriad of roles that he has had throughout his career and inspired insightful questions from students regarding life and IT security.� Adrianne continues, �I think that the students really appreciated hearing his experiences and I appreciated his credible reinforcement of class topics as well as providing an update on the latest trends in IT security. I hope that we may continue to offer such opportunities for our students.� The speakers bureau is available to all CIS instructors wishing to enliven their students' classroom experience.

Dr. McLean Named "Educator of the Year"
The Association of IT Professionals have named Dr. Eph McLean as its �Educator of the Year.� This is high praise from a national organization of 9000 members, largely practitioner. Congratulations, Eph!

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