Council Contact: Bernard Tan, President

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 Bernard Tan, President, Association for Information Systems 
                    February 2010 

The International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) was held in Phoenix, Arizona, USA from December 15 to 18, 2009. There were more than 1,200 participants at this conference, including most of the AIS Council members. The quality of papers presented at the conference continues to be excellent. Colleagues whom I have interacted with at the conference made many positive comments about their experience at the conference. I congratulate conference co-chairs Jay Nunamaker and Wendy Currie for organizing this excellent conference. ICIS 2010 will be held in St Louis, Missouri, USA. I encourage colleagues to attend this conference because, like many past ICIS, it will be another excellent conference and another great opportunity for networking.

At ICIS 2009, we celebrated two important milestones of our field. AIS was incorporated in 1994 and this is the fifteenth year for AIS. Over the last fifteen years, AIS membership has grown from several hundred to more than 4,000. I hope AIS membership will continue to grow in the future as we embark on new initiatives such as student chapters and professional memberships. ICIS was first held in 1980 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA and ICIS 2009 is the thirtieth ICIS. The first ten ICIS were held in North America. In the next two decades, ICIS became truly international by moving out of North America to locations such as Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Brisbane, Barcelona, and Paris. Moving forward, the AIS Council has made a decision to rotate ICIS among our three world regions so as to raise the interest in and promote the growth of our discipline in different parts of the world. Therefore, colleagues will have more opportunities to attend ICIS in exotic locations in different parts of the world.

Establishing our presence in different parts of the world has always been a goal of AIS. An effective strategy for accomplishing this goal is through educational efforts. Universities from emerging countries that have received assistance from our members to develop and offer undergraduate or graduate programs in our discipline tend to form the bases through which we can bring new members into AIS and improve our geographical reach. Indeed, there have been pioneering efforts by our members to reach out to universities in Africa and South America.

As an excellent example of such a pioneering effort, a group of our members have helped the Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia to develop and launch a doctoral program in information systems. They have travelled to Ethiopia to impart their knowledge to local faculty members and participated in the co-supervision of doctoral theses. Members of this group include Donald Amoroso (Kennesaw State University), Marie-Claude Boudreau (University of Georgia), Irwin Brown (University of Cape Town), Monica Garfield (Bentley University), Shawndra Hill (University of Pennsylvania), Dawn Medlin (Appalachian State University), Solomon Negash (Kennesaw State University), Detmar Straub (Georgia State University), and Richard Watson (University of Georgia). Their efforts have helped AIS to reach out to the information systems community in Africa. I thank all members of this group for their contributions to the development of our field. This project has been highlighted in the AIS Volunteer Spotlight.

In the coming months, we will continue to showcase the pioneering efforts of other groups of colleagues through the AIS Volunteer Spotlight. As an association that relies very much on the initiatives and efforts of volunteers to accomplish our mission, it is important that we recognize the good work of our members. If you are aware of similar efforts by our member that have contributed to our mission and benefited our community, please let us have the details. I hope 2010 will be a fulfilling year for you!

Bernard C.Y. Tan
Professor of Information Systems, National University of Singapore
President (2009-10), Association for Information systems
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~btan