|
AIS Newsletter Spring 2009 |
|
IS SECTION / AMERICAN ACCOUNTING ASSOCIATION |
|
President’s Letter |
|
Though these are challenging times we continue to pursue our collective mission of promoting excellence in research, teaching, and practice! Thank you for all your support to the section; I continue to be amazed at the depth of knowledge and the positive service attitude of so many of our members. The result is a full, but exciting year. We had an excellent Mid-Year Meeting in Charleston in January. Be sure to check out the photos posted on the website. Congratulations to the following award winners: Best Education Paper - “Preparing Graphical Representations of Business Processes and Making Inferences from Them.” Faye Borthick, Georgia State University, Gary Schneider, Quinnipiac University, and Anthony Vance, Georgia State University. Best Case - “Auditing Operational Compliance: The Case of Employee Long Distance Piracy.” Marcia Watson, Mississippi State University, and Kevin Dow, Kent State University. Best Research Paper - “Designing Fraud Risk Assessment Decision Aids to Promote the Acquisition of Expertise.” Britton McKay, Georgia Southern University, Carolyn Strand Norman, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Jacob M. Rose, Southern Illinois University. Please thank the Institute of Management Accountants for sponsoring the Best Education Paper and Best Case awards. Please also thank the authors, reviewers, discussants, and moderators who contributed to excellent concurrent sessions. Please thank Marianne Bradford for organizing the meeting, and Faye Borthick and Ronny Daigle for coordinating the IS paper selection process, and Guido Geerts and Robert Biscontri for the SET paper selection process. Please also thank KPMG for their continuing support of the meeting, both financial and non-financial. Immediately prior to the Mid-Year Meeting, we had the New Scholars Consortium and a new half-day workshop on IT governance and assurance (WITGA) that provided an update on ISACA developments and presentations on the use of ISACA resources in the classroom. ISACA is the association serving a broad range of IT governance professionals. Please thank ISACA for their support, Roger Debreceny for providing leadership for WITGA, and Brad Tuttle for providing leadership to the New Scholars Consortium. In a closing panel session, Nancy Bagranoff, Martha Eining, Vern Richardson, and Steve Sutton opened a dialogue on the challenges and opportunities for AIS and the IS Section. Though a number of issues were discussed, a subsequent poll of the panelists was used to identify a couple issues that we could begin to tackle as a section. The first of these is the shortage of AIS doctoral candidates. As indicated in the fall newsletter, we had started preliminary work with ISACA to proactively promote an academic career among ISACA members as part of the broader partnership initiative with ISACA. After the Mid-Year Meeting panel, it became clear that we need to do even more. Vern Richardson, President-Elect, is spearheading the development of a “Meet and Greet” session at KPMG’s office during the Annual Meeting in New York and an information conference to be held on the day before the Midyear Meeting in January 2010 (to be held concurrently with the AIS New Scholars Consortium). We are working with KPMG, other audit firms, and ISACA to “get the word out” and invite interested professionals to come to one or the other session. We will also be asking section members to nominate promising undergraduate and master's students to attend the informational meetings. KPMG has agreed to host the information conference associated with the 2010 Mid-Year Meeting such that we anticipate there would be no charge for travel, lodging, or registration for the selected participants. There will also be no charge for the “Meet and Greet” in New York, but participants will need to pay their own way to the meeting. Our hope is to primarily attract individuals in the area. We will ask top researchers in our field to present their research and discuss what a doctoral program would entail, etc. Representatives from doctoral programs supporting AIS will also be asked to be present to support one or both information sessions. To provide potential doctoral candidates easily accessible information, we are developing a website to promote IS doctoral education and provide information about, and links to, schools that support PhD candidates with an interest in AIS. Based on responses to the fall newsletter as well as other sources, we identified schools that potentially support AIS PhD programs and asked them to complete a survey providing information about their program. If your school would be interested in being included in the web site and promotion, and you haven’t received an email with a link to the survey, please let me know and I’ll send you the link. This doctoral education initiative is a very large undertaking and much has to be completed in a short time. Thanks to Vern for leading the effort and to Mary Curtis, Del DeVries, and Terry Glandon for providing invaluable support. If you have any ideas or suggestions for this initiative, please let me know. We would be happy to hear from you. We are also well underway in the process of publishing our fourth volume of C3, A Compendium of Classroom Cases and Tools. C3 offers valuable active learning exercises to engage our students in better understanding the nature of accounting information systems in a variety of contexts. Given the constantly changing nature of information systems, the tri-annual publication of instructional materials is an important collaboration in our pursuit of excellence. Thanks to co-editors Ronny Daigle and Sarah Bee for their efforts. It is anticipated that the volume will be completed and posted at the AAACommons website later this summer. More information about the volume will be provided as it is completed. I am also happy to report that we have started work on a special section of JIS, “Reviews of Information Systems Research” that will publish selected reviews of a stream of research in information systems (IS). The reviews will seek to align that stream of research to current and future research in Accounting Information Systems (AIS). Roger Debreceny, guest editor, received 20 proposals so progress is being made. We are anticipating publication of around 12 reviews in a 2010 issue of JIS. We continue to work with the new AAACommons initiative introduced at the Annual Meeting and demonstrated at the Mid-Year Meeting. Marilyn Prosch has agreed to take the lead of our efforts with Julie Smith David to develop space where we can work with one another and pursue excellence through improved communication. I’m pleased to report that Edward Balli, Ashley Burrowes, Akhilesh Chandra, Graham Gal, Margarita Lenk, Douglas Ziegenfuss, Terry Glandon, Ann O’Brien, and Chih-Chen Lee have agreed to serve on the committee. This is particularly commendable since the committee has agreed to serve for two years. If you have any ideas or suggestions for the Commons, please feel free to contact us. Last, but certainly not least, we are now looking forward to the annual meeting in New York. Please thank Andreas Nicolaou for his work coordinating the meeting. We received a new record, 63, paper submissions. As a result, we have been assigned a record 16 sessions; 11 regular paper sessions, 3 paper dialogue sessions, and 2 panel sessions. The paper dialogue sessions are new this year and are designed for authors to solicit broad feedback and audience participation in a workshop style format. Each session has four or five papers and no formal discussants are assigned to the papers. There is an expectation that those attending will actively provide input to authors and authors are encouraged to prepare a list of items where audience comment would be particularly helpful. The papers have been organized by topic: “Business Models for Sustainable Performance”, “Internal Control Reporting, Continuous Monitoring, and IT Investment Performance”, and “Experiments in Software Piracy, Fraud and Risk in Accounting Contexts.” Each of the papers in these sessions should provide a unique perspective to the session objective and stimulate discussion of the relevant issues. Our two panel sessions involve collaboration between the profession and our section to provide current updates in security and governance. The panel session titled Next Generation Thinking in Information Security is based on a new initiative by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). Panelists are Steve Sutton, University of Central Florida, Paul Steinbart, Arizona State University, Robert Hodgkinson, ICAEW, and Jennifer Bayuk, ISACA. The panel session titled What Accounting Professors Need to Know about IT Governance is sponsored by ISACA. Panelists are Tom Lamm, ISACA, Robert Stroud, Computer Associates, and Rob Nehmer, Oakland University. Both promise to be valuable in developing our knowledge to be applied to teaching and research. Please make plans to attend the Annual Meeting and enjoy a varied program as well as great opportunity for networking with one another. Now more than ever, we need the support of our colleagues! I hope you share my enthusiasm for all our section activities. We are working on great initiatives in our pursuit of excellence and we have so many dedicated volunteers who tirelessly give of their time and energy to make it happen. The election of officers for next year is open from now until May 31st. The nominations committee put forth the following slate to lead our continuing efforts: President (automatic) - Vernon J. Richardson, University of Arkansas President-elect (Vice President - Academic) - Mary Curtis, University of North Texas Secretary - Carlin Dowling, University of Melbourne Treasurer - Marcus Odom, Southern Illinois University At Large (2) - Chih-Chen Lee, Northern Illinois University, and Kevin Kobelsky, Baylor University Research and Publications Committee Member - Brad Tuttle, University of South Carolina If you haven’t voted, please visit the section website announcements and follow the link to vote. In addition, if you are interested in serving the section next year, please let Vern know (vrichardson@walton.uark.edu). There are many different ways to serve and I encourage your involvement in the section. Thank you for this opportunity to work with you! I hope to see you in New York! |
|
Elaine Mauldin, University of Missouri |