MIS Board of Advisors

The University of Arizona MIS Advisory Board has been instrumental in helping the MIS program move forward along its three basic missions: educate students, conduct research, and engage in outreach activities.

Education
A crucial part of our success over the years has been our ability to place our students in companies that are both technology developers and users. Due to our reputation as one of the strongest technology-intensive MIS programs, our students were hired by firms that develop technology (such as IBM, HP, Microsoft, Cisco Systems) and user/consult on technology (such as Boeing, Honeywell, Accenture and Price Waterhouse Coopers). Our board members come from many of these organizations and recruit our students. But, most importantly, they help the students gain practical experience through internships, enlighten them through panel discussions on critical issues, and improve their marketability with mock interviews, presentation evaluations, etc. They also help the faculty members review and revise MIS curriculum so it remains state of the art.

Research
Many research opportunities were identified and pursued by the faculty members as a result of their interaction with the board. Some of our recent work on telecommuting, wire-less technologies, inter-organizational data and application integration, data mining and web-based marketing came out of discussions with the board.

Outreach
Our board plays an active role in our ability to reach external community. They participate in grant/fund generating activities, sponsor our conferences, help us reach executives far and wide who are interested in our research, and participate in many of our social endeavors.

Click here to access the MIS Board of Advisors website.

FITA 2008 Conference

The department continues to move ahead and Shape the Future of IT through Planning a two-day outreach conference which was held on February 29 – March 1, 2008.

The Arizona Exposium on Frontiers in Information Technology and Applications (FITA 2008) provided a forum for business leaders, faculty, and students to exchange ideas on new IT problems and solutions, particularly in such frontier areas as service-oriented computing, business intelligence, security, online marketing, collaboration technologies, etc.

This event was not a conventional academic conference because it is designed to attract a balanced mix of industrialists, academia, and students. We called this event an "exposium" since it is between an expo, which mainly draws people from the industry, and a symposium, which mainly attracts people from academic institutions. That is, Exposium = Expo + Symposium.

The program consisted of two keynote speeches, eight planery talks, and 36 other invited and submitted presentations, 21 graduate student posters, and nine undergraduate case competition teams – all of which helped to facilitate the networking and exchange of ideas among conference participants.

Many people contributed to the planning and organization of FITA 2008 including the various conference chairs including Jay Nunamaker, Sudha Ram, Daniel Zeng, Hsinchun Chen, Styne Hill, Doug Brown, Jane Prescott-Smith, Dina Wilkinson, Ron Schott, Leslie Bromberg, Larry Dyer, Cathy Larson, Moshe Dror, Josh Smith, Josh Hottenstein, and Clayton Hamilton.

Session chairs included Mike Shaw, Sue Brown, George Ball, David Pingry, Jim Spohrer, Hsinchun Chen, Daniel Zeng, Bob Lusch, Jay Nunamaker, and Bill Neumann were extremely helpful with attracting many excellent speakers for the conference. In particular, I would like to thank Anji Siegel for her tireless effort and professional expertise with managing various critical logistic and marketing issues.

We could not have conducted the conference without the help of our many volunteers who included Nachalin Suakkaphong, Aaron Sun, Yan An, Manlu Liu, Jun Liu, Maria Puig, Mary Lambert, Mona Lopez, Jae Park, Joyce Chen, Michele Pesnell, Jae Park, Nelly Zapata, Chris Diller, Laura Reid, Mark Patton, Ron Schott, Bill Neumann, Yu-Fang Huang(Jamie), Matt Jensen, and Roberto Mejias.

Lastly, we would like to thank the FITA 2008 sponsors including Eller College, sanofi-aventis, SAP, Raytheon, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and IBM.  Without their generous support, this conference would not have been possible.

We had many very interesting and excellent presentations during FITA 2008. To make them available to more people, we will be posting the conference presentations online at http://fita2008.ecom.arizona.edu over the next couple of weeks. 

In addition, we have already posted  the pictures taken during the conference and invite you to view them on the FITA 2008 website.

J. Leon Zhao, Eller Professor and Interim Head