SIGMIS ANNUAL REPORT
July 1994 - June 1995

Submitted by: George Kasper

SIGMIS is the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group On Management Information Systems. Founded in 1961 as the Special Interest Group on Business Data Processing (SIGBDP), and later known as the Special Interest Group on Business Information Technology (SIGBIT), MIS was the second field recognized by the ACM as a Special Interest Group. Today, SIGMIS has some two thousand members throughout the world.

SIGMIS members are interested in information systems and technologies for management and the management of information systems and technologies. The mission of SIGMIS is to promote best practice, research, education in information systems and technologies for management and the management of information systems and technologies to increase the value of these resources to management.

 

Publications

SIGMIS publishes DATABASE, a quarterly journal devoted to communicating advances in research and best practice in MIS. For more that twenty-five years, DATABASE has been a highly regarded publication in the MIS field. DATABASE is received by some 2500 subscribers and over 500 libraries worldwide.

In May 1994, the editorship and editorial offices of DATABASE were moved to Georgia State University, under the editorship of Ephraim McLean and Detmar Straub. Since then, they have produced four editions of DATABASE; the fifth issue is in process. The editions and page lengths follow.

  

   Vol. 25, No. 2, May 1994,        64 pages
   Vol. 25, No. 3, August 1994,     60 pages
   Vol. 25, No. 4, November 1994,   48 pages
   Vol. 26, No. 1, February 1995,   72 pages

A meeting of the DATABASE Associate Editors took place in December, 1995, in Vancouver, Canada. DATABASE has also adopted a new look as "The DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems." Several additions have also been made to its content, including columns and commentary such as:

 
AIS (accounting information systems),
IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing - written by Gordon Davis),
PRISM (Pacific Research Institute for Information Systems and Management), and
Practitioner's Corner.
Other publication initiatives include a World Wide Web home page for DATABASE, and development of brochures to market SIGMIS to potential individual and institutional members. SIGMIS also distributes the proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems.

 

Electronic Publication

SIGMIS is a founding member of ISWorld Net, a WWW site for information on MIS issues, practice, and education. ISWorld Net can be accessed vie WWW at: URL:http://www.cox.smu.edu/mis/iswnet/home.html

These services are part of the responsibilities of the SIGMIS Information Director, Dennis Adams. Dennis can be reached at: Adams@UOH.edu

Conference Activities SIGMIS is a 10% sponsor of Multimedia 95 and a 25% sponsor of SIGCPR's 1996 conference on the virtual work place to be held in Denver, April 11-13, 1996. SIGMIS is "in cooperation" with Digital Libraries '95 and the 4th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Economics and Management, Tel-Aviv, Israel, scheduled for January 8-10, 1996.

 

Awards

SIGMIS is the sponsor of the MIS Doctoral Dissertation Award. This award is given at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), an annual conference of MIS researchers.

SIGMIS also awards a one year membership to all forty Ph.D. student invite to participate in the ICIS Doctoral Consortium. At least twenty of these students are from non-North American Universities.

 

Educational Activities

In cooperation with the Data Processing Management Association (DPMS) and the Association for Information Systems, SIGMIS and ACM developed the Collaborative Undergraduate Information Systems Curriculum as a model curriculum for undergraduate education in information systems. An outline of this curriculum was published in DATABASE.

 

Other Initiatives

As promotion, over 1000 copies of DATABASE were distributed at the ICIS conference held in Vancouver, Canada.

Members are being solicited to develop Professional Chapters. Alejandra Oliveros has agreed to be the SIGMIS contact person for Latin America. Alejandra can be reached at: oliveros@ubetec.edu.ar

The ACM and the IEEE Computing Society are founders of FOCUS, the Federation on Computing, United States. FOCUS represents the United States in the International Federation for Information Processing. FOCUS acts on behalf of members societies in carrying out international cooperation to advance the information processing profession. SIGMIS funds attendance of the ACM's representative for one of the annual meetings of FOCUS.

 

Membership Concerns

Membership in SIGMIS has been declining. Many of the initiatives outlined above are intended to address this problem. The intent of these initiatives is to increase member involvement and make SIGMIS more visible. Visibility is key to recruiting new members. Increasing member involvement results is key to leadership development.