ATHENS, Ga. — Richard Watson, who holds the J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished Chair for Internet Strategy and directs the Center for Information Systems Leadership in the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business, has been elected president of the Association of Information Systems (AIS). Watson will serve as president-elect for one year beginning next May and as president the following year.
AIS is the premier global organization for academics specializing in information systems and has nearly 3,000 members from 89 countries. It publishes two journals and has an alliance with MIS Quarterly, generally recognized as the field’s leading journal. AIS sponsors the major international conference in information systems and regional conferences in the Americas, Asia/Pacific, and Europe. The association’s home page is www.aisnet.org.
Watson has served on the AIS Council as vice president of communications since 2000. As a council member, he helped establish a new policy making the AIS Electronic Library (eLibrary) available to all universities in countries not on the World Bank’s list of high-income economies. The eLibrary includes complete sets of four journals and two conference proceedings. It provides a key resource on information systems research and education for university libraries that typically have very limited budgets.
He has published more than 80 journal articles and written books on electronic commerce and data management. His work has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. He has given invited presentations in 20 countries and is a visiting professor at Agder University College in Norway. In 2001, John Wiley & Sons appointed him as its consulting editor for its net-enhanced organization (NEO) series.
Watson is co-chair of the 2004 International Conference on Information Systems, the pre-eminent information systems conference. He recently finished a four-year term as a senior editor for MIS Quarterly.
A professor in the Terry College’s Department of Management Information Systems, Watson joined the faculty in 1989. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, where he studied on a Fulbright award, and his MBA from Monash University in Australia. In addition he holds a Diploma in Computation and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Western Australia.
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