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ISDS Faculty Reaches New Heights in the Fall of 2018; Papers Published in Prestigious Journals, Research Presented, Awards Given

By Keith Morelli

ISDS Research Awards

TAMPA (February 5, 2019) -- The New England Patriots may have grabbed all the attention this month but the fall of 2018 belongs to the professors of the Muma College of Business’ Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department.

“The ISDS faculty has broken all records of excellence,” Dean Moez Limayem told the college’s Executive Advisory Council at a recent meeting. “In what other departments achieve in years and years and years, they have achieved in just a few months.”

The achievements? There are many.

ISDS faculty members over the last three months of 2018 published, or had agreements to publish, nearly a dozen papers in tier-one journals, said ISDS instructor Matt Mullarkey, representing an unusual alignment of the planets.

“Some of the work,” he said, “has been in the works for five years or longer.”

Additionally, professors have attended conferences, presented research and received numerous awards recognizing them for their work.

Here’s a glimpse into what that august group of researchers did over the last quarter of 2018:

  • Sunil Mithas wrote research papers that were accepted for publication in three top-notch journals. Mithas, a World Class Scholar, who came to the Muma College of Business last semester, co-wrote a paper titled "Organized Complexity of Digital Business Strategy: A Configurational Perspective" that has been conditionally accepted by MIS Quarterly, a highly recognized journal of excellence. The October issue of Government Information Quarterly contained a Mithas paper titled “An Empirical and Comparative Analysis of E-Government Performance Measurement Models: Model Selection via Explanation, Predication and Parsimony.” He also wrote a paper titled “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder: Toward a Contextual Understanding of Compensation for IT Professionals Within and Across Geographies” that appeared in Information Systems Research.
  • Alan Hevner is used to the accolades. He now is a Distinguished University Professor at USF and Eminent Scholar in the ISDS Department, where he holds the Citigroup/Hidden River Chair of Distributed Technology. His ground-breaking work in design science is recognized around the globe. Last April, Hevner was honored at his alma mater, Purdue University as a Distinguished Science Alumni. More recently, he was named an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award recipient by Marquis Who's Who, a premier publisher of biographical profiles. Hevner, also has been named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, selected by his peers; a Schoeller Senior Fellow at the Friedrich Alexander Universitat Erlanger-Nurnberg, Germany, from 2014-2017; a Parnas Fellow at Lero Institute in Ireland; and was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to Design Science Research. Additionally, Hevner and ISDS Instructor Matt Mullarkey wrote “An Elaborated Action Design Research Process Model” that appeared in the European Journal of Information Systems.
  • Logan Steele, assistant professor, recently co-authored an article that focused on when and why sexual harassment prevention training backfires, a surprisingly common occurrence. The article, which included ways to mitigate the trend, was accepted by Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice. In December, Steele’s research titled “Learning from Stories of Leadership: How Reading about Personalized and Socialized Politicians Impacts Performance on an Ethical Decision-Making Simulation” was published in The Leadership Quarterly.
  • A paper written by Balaji Padmanabhan and recent PhD graduate student Onkar Malgonde, Assistant Professor He Zhang and Muma College of Business Dean Moez Limayem titled “Taming Complexity in Search Matching: Two-Sided Recommender Systems on Digital Platforms,” was accepted for publication in the highly respected MIS Quarterly. During the fall of 2018, Padmanabhan, Lina Bouayad and Associate Dean Kaushal Chari wrote a paper titled “Audit Policies under the Sentinel Effect: Deterrence-Drive Algorithms” that was accepted by the highly respected academic journal Information Systems Research.
  • Shivendu Shivendu, associate professor, wrote one paper titled “The Impact of Digitization on Content Markets: Prices, Profit and Social Welfare” and a second one titled “Optimal Asset Transfer in IT Outsourcing Contracts,” both of which were accepted by MIS Quarterly.
  • Marvin Karlins, professor, co-authored a book in 2008 titled "What Every Body Is Saying" that discusses how to read body language and detect deceptive behaviors. The book, co-written by Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence officer, this fall was No. 5 on a best-selling, non-fiction books list compiled by the Associated Press. The top book on the list: "Becoming" by Michelle Obama.
  • Kaushik Dutta, associate professor, co-chaired a workshop on IT and systems at the Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems in 2018. Four of the papers presented at the workshop, or 10 percent, came from USF researchers.
  • Dezhi Yin, assistant professor, won the MIS Quarterly “Reviewer of the Year” award at its December conference in San Francisco. And at that conference Mithas research paper titled “Does One Size Fit All? Exploring Successful Digital Innovation Governance Configurations” was the first runner-up for the “best paper” award.
  • Sagar Samtani, assistant professor, was runner-up for the INFORMS IS Society’s Nunamaker-Chen dissertation award.

And if that's not enough, there is more iciing on the cake enjoyed by the department:

The inaugural cohort of the department’s first executive master’s program graduated and one graduate of the master’s program in Business Analytics and Information Systems took a position right out of school for an annual salary of $200,000. The department’s practice center also achieved a milestone, earning more than $1.5 million in 115 projects with outside businesses that involved 225 students.

In terms of engagement, ReliaQuest has begun a partnership with the department offering boot camps for students and the fifth cohort of the Jabil Citizen Data Science Certificate Program was completed along with the first cohort of the Tampa General Hospital Executive Leadership Certificate Program.