SIGMIS Annual Report
July, 1995 - June, 1996
Submitted by: GEORGE M. KASPER
SIGMIS is the Special Interest Group on Management
Information Systems of the ACM. Founded in 1961 as the
Special Interest Group on Business Data Processing and later
known as the Special Interest Group on Business Information
Technology, 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 these
systems and technologies. SIGMIS publishes Data Base,
cosponsors conferences, gives awards for dissertation
research, is a founder of ISWorld on the WWW, and makes many
other services available to its members.
During the 1996 fiscal year, the significant
accomplishments and initiatives of SIGMIS included the
continued development of paper and electronic versions of Data
Base (http://www.cis.gsu.edu/~dbase),
the hiring of a membership/development director, a joint
SIGCPR/SIGMIS Conference, continued recognition of student
accomplishments, and the nomination of two SIGMIS members to
be ACM Fellows.
Publications
SIGMIS publishes Data Base, a quarterly journal
devoted to communicating advances in research and best
practice in MIS. Since its beginning in 1961, Data Base
has been a highly regarded publication in the MIS field. Data
Base is received by some twenty-five hundred subscribers
and over five hundred libraries worldwide.
In May 1994, the editorship and editorial offices of Data
Base were moved to Georgia State University, under the
editorship of Drs. Ephraim McLean and Detmar Straub. Since
then, Data Base has experienced a number of content
and cosmetic changes, all in an attempt to make it more
informative and appealing to its readers. Attempts to
improvement Data Base will continue.
In total, 262 pages were published in Data Base
during FY 1996. This represents a 7 percent increase over
the previous FY. The Data Base issues and page counts
for the FY are as follows:
Vol. 26, Nos. 2&3, May/August 1995, 124 pages
Vol. 26, No. 4, November 1995, 61 pages
Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter 1996, 77 pages
A meeting of the Data Base editorship and staff and
two members of the SIGMIS Executive Committee took place in
Atlanta, Georgia in May 1996. The Data Base
facilities were toured and plans for FY 1997 were developed.
Abstracts of Data Base articles and other
information on SIGMIS can now be found on WWW Home Page http://www.cis.gsu.edu/~dbase.
SIGMIS is also a founding member of ISWorld Net, a WWW site
for information on MIS issues, practice, and education (
http://www.isworld.org/isworld.html).
Through the ACM New York Office, SIGMIS continues to
distribute the proceedings of the International
Conference on Information Systems (ICIS).
Conference Activities
SIGMIS continues to be a sponsor of several conferences. In
1996, SIGMIS will be a 10 percent sponsor of Multimedia
96 to be held in Boston, November 18-22, 1996 (http://www.acm.org/sigmm/MM96).
In April 1996, SIGMIS was a 25% sponsor of the SIGCPR/SIGMIS
1996 conference on the virtual work place. (Information
on the SIGCPR/SIGMIS 1997 can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigcpr/sigcpr97).
SIGMIS remains a nonvoting member of the Executive Committee
of the International Conference on Information Systems
(http://www.isworld.org/isw
orld.html).
Awards
SIGMIS is the sponsor of the MIS Doctoral Dissertation
Award. In 1995, this award is given at the ICIS to
Sandra Slaughter for her Ph.D. dissertation work,
"Software Development Practices and Software
Maintenance Performance: A Field Study," University of
Minnesota, 1995.
A one year membership to SIGMIS is also awarded to all
forty-ph.d. students invite to participate in the
International Conference on Information Systems Doctoral
Consortium. At least half of these students are from
non-North American Universities.
SIGMIS is nominating two longtime members and senior
statesmen of the field to be Fellows in the ACM. To our
knowledge, this is a first for SIGMIS. We plan to continue
to recognize and promote SIGMIS people in the future.
Other Continuing Initiatives
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 member
societies in carrying out international cooperation to
advance the information processing profession. SIGMIS
continues to fund the attendance of the ACM's representative
for one of the annual meetings of FOCUS.
Membership
Membership has been a concern for SIGMIS for many years.
Membership in SIGMIS has been declining. What to do about
this problem has been discussed for many years over multiple
administrations. In 1996, SIGMIS hired a part-time
membership/development director. Colleen D. Bauder has been
hired to promote SIGMIS and Data Base by soliciting
individual and institutional memberships in SIGMIS, by
securing advertising in Data Base, and by increasing
the visibility of SIGMIS and Data Base in both the
academic and practitioner communities. Her duties will also
include the responsibilities of managing editor for Data
Base. (The previous managing editor, Karen Hays, will be
technical editor of Data Base.) Colleen can be
reached at the Data Base office (404) 651-0258.
Fund Balance
Despite declining membership, SIGMIS has managed to continue
to increase its fund balance. In FY 1996, the SIGMIS fund
balance grew by 3.6 percent.
George M. Kasper, Chair
ACM Special Interest Group on
Management Information Systems