SIGMIS Annual Report

July 1998 - June 1999
Submitted by: George Kasper, SIGMIS

Mission and Overview

SIGMIS is the Special Interest Group on management Information Systems of the ACM. Members of SIGMIS are interested in information systems and technologies for management and the management of these systems and technologies. SIGMIS was founded in 1961 as the Special Interest Group on Business Data Processing and later was known as the Special Interest Group on Business Information Technology. Today, SIGMIS has close to one-thousand members throughout the world; publishes DATA BASE; cosponsors CIKM; cooperates in the International Conference on Information Systems, the European Conference on Information Systems, and International Federation for Information Processing, and other conferences; promotes student achievement; is a cofounder of ISWorld Net; and partners with other professional organizations to provides other services to its members.

 

Summary of Recent Accomplishments

During the last FY, some of the major events and accomplishments of SIGMIS include:
Becoming a regular cosponsor of the European Conference on Information Systems
Continued to cosponsor the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM)
Continued to sponsor the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) Doctoral
Dissertation Paper Award
Continued to represent ACM as a member of a select group to develop a model MS in IS curriculum
Expanded SIGMIS member services by including a copy of the CIKM proceedings
Association for Information Systems agree to include DATA BASE as one of its member services

 

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 more than fifteen hundred subscribers and more than four hundred libraries worldwide. DATA BASE is listed in Science Citation Index, Journal Citations Report. This was Dr. Mark Keil's first full year as Co-Editor of DATA BASE. Dr. Ephraim McLean remains Co-Editor of DATA BASE. Under the direction of Eph, Detmar, and Mark, DATA BASE issues and page counts for the past year were:

 

Vol. 29

No. 2

91 pages

Vol. 29

No. 3

93 pages

Vol. 29

No. 4

80 pages

Vol. 30

No. 1

Forthcoming

A meeting of DATA BASE Departmental Editors was held in December 1998 at ICIS.

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).

 

Conference Activities

SIGMIS was a 50 percent cosponsor of the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), held November 3-7, 1998 in Washington, D.C. More details are available at http://www.csee.umbc.edu/cikm/1999. SIGMIS remains an active supporter of ICIS and a nonvoting member of the Executive Committee of ICIS (http://www.isworld.org/isworld.html). SIGMIS is also a supporter of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) to be held July 3-5, 2000 at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna, Austria at http:// ecis2000.wu-wien.ac.at/start.htm.

 

Awards

Beginning with the 1995 ICIS, SIGMIS became the sponsor of the ICIS MIS Doctoral Dissertation Award. In 1995, this award was given at ICIS to Sandra Slaughter for her Ph.D. dissertation work, "Software Development Practices and Software Maintenance Performance: A Field Study, " University of Minnesota, 1995. In 1996, the award was given to Dr. Amarnath Prakash for his paper titled "Reducing Cycle Time Through Interorganizational Linkages: An Empirical Study of the U.S. Apparel Industry," which was based on his dissertation work completed at the University of Memphis. In 1997, the award was given to Dr. Mayuram Krishnan for his paper titled "Costs and Quality Considerations in Software Product Management," which was based on his dissertation work completed at the University of Michigan. In 1998, the award was given to Dr. Ranganathan Chandrasekaran for his work "Understanding the Context, Process, and Outcome of Strategic IT Decisions" completed at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, India.

A one-year membership to SIGMIS is also awarded to all Ph.D. students invited to participate in the annual ICIS and ECIS Doctoral Consortia. Most of these students are from non-North American Universities.

 

Curriculum Development

In 1998, SIGMIS joined representatives of the Association for Information Technology Professionals (AITP) and the Association for Information Systems (AIS) to develop a model curriculum for masters education in information systems. A draft has been produced and is currently being circulated for comment and revision. A copy of the draft can be found at http://cis.bentley.edu/msis.

 

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. At the end of the past year, SIGMIS membership was 1039. This represents a decrease of approximately 200 members or 20 percent year over year.

 

Fund Balance

At the end of the FY, the SIGMIS fund balance was $131,845. This represents almost a 15 percent increase in the fund balance year over year.

 

Fund Balance

FY'93

$107,077

FY'94

$114,927

FY'95

$113,193

FY'96

$136,119

FY'97

$121,440

FY'98

$114,919

FY'99

$131,845