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News Release

Last modified: Tuesday, May 31, 2011

IU Kelley School of Business is hosting an international symposium on systems analysis and design

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 31, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University's Kelley School of Business is hosting an international symposium on systems analysis and design, with the purpose of improving the level of research scholarship in the field.

Brad Wheeler, IU vice president for information technology and chief information officer and professor of information systems in the Kelley School, will give the keynote address, "Analysis, Design and Software Economics at Scale: Questions for a New Decade."

The sessions of the Special Interest Group on Systems Analysis and Design (SIGSAND) will take place on Friday and Saturday (June 3-4) at the Kelley School's Godfrey Graduate and Executive Education Center, 1275 E. 10th St.

"IU is delighted to host the SIGSAND symposium as research on how to improve the professional practice in software design is an ongoing need," Wheeler said. "The symposium has drawn a marquee list of researchers and IU is a great place for this meeting given its leading role in many open source software projects."

Those attending the symposium believe that systems analysis and design (SA&D) is at the "core" of the Information Systems (IS) discipline. As a consequence, research examining aspects of SA&D should be an integral part of IS research.

"Systems analysis and design is one of the central foundations of the field of information systems and of technology more generally. The SIGSAND symposium is the world's premier academic event devoted solely to research in this critical area," said conference program chair Glenn J. Browne, associate professor of commerce at the University of Virginia's McIntyre School of Commerce.

Organizing the conference with Browne is Vijay Khatri, associate professor of information systems in the Kelley School.

"The Kelley School is very excited to be the host institution for this symposium, which highlights the need for analysis and design of enterprise systems," said Ash Soni, chair of the Operations and Decision Technologies Department and the Kelley School's associate dean of information technology as of July 1. "We are ideally positioned for such an event considering that Kelley's Operations and Decision Technologies Department is a leading-edge player in both the management of enterprise systems and in business analytics."

This will be the 10th Symposium on Research in Systems Analysis and Design, which began with discussions by researchers from March 2002 to April 2003, who met as part of Association for Information Systems (AIS) meetings to discuss the state of research in systems analysis and design.

In 2003, AIS approved a proposal for a special interest group on the topic and a symposium was held the following year at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Since then, the event has been hosted by the University of Cincinnati, the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, the University of Tulsa, Brigham Young University and Virginia Commonwealth University. This will be the first time it has been held at IU.

Several sessions will focus on building enterprise-wide information systems. A highlight is a panel discussion, which this year will focus on "Research in Analysis and Design of Enterprise Systems: A Historical Perspective, Current Challenges, and Future Opportunities." Andrew Gemino, associate dean of the undergraduate program of the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University in Canada, will serve as a moderator.

Panelists will include:

• Dennis Galletta, former president of the Association for Information Systems and a professor of information systems at the Katz School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh;
• Alan R. Hevner, professor and eminent scholar and the Citigroup/Hidden River Chair of Distributed Technology in the Information Systems Decision Sciences Department at the University of South Florida;
• Ron Weber, former editor-in-chief of MIS Quarterly and dean of the faculty of information technology of Monash University in Australia;
• Barb Williams, director of information management, Hill-Rom Inc. USA

Although systems analysis and design is at the heart of the information systems discipline, there is a notable shortage of research on these topics in the leading research journals, which makes the symposium even more important, said Ramesh Venkataraman, chair of the master of science in information systems program and a Whirlpool Faculty Fellow at Kelley.

"The increase in the strategic value of IT to business has led to increased focus on designing, building and deploying various enterprise-wide information systems," Venkataraman said. "These topics are at the heart of what will be discussed at this symposium and are hence both timely and crucial to the information systems discipline."

Registration is now closed for the symposium (although the media is welcome). More information is available online at https://www.iub.edu/~sigsand/. The panel discussion, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. on Friday, can be watched live at https://www.indiana.edu/~ksbmedia/live/launchflash.html?format=&folder=&f ilename=sigsand_20110306_panelDiscussion.

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