Association for Information Systems
PO Box 92523
Atlanta, GA 30314-0523 USA
The Association for Information Systems mourns the passing of Dr. William R. (Bill) King, who spearheaded the formation of AIS and served as its inaugural president and executive director. He passed away on July 23, 2026 at the age of 87. Dr. King was a LEO and Fellow of the AIS as well as a co-founder of both the International Conference on Information Systems and the Americas Conference on Information Systems. He was one of the formative scholars in strategic information systems planning, inspiring many dissertations and subsequent studies in this important research stream. To read his obituary, visit here and to read a touching post by one of his former students and a former president of AIS – Dennis Galletta – continue reading below.
Dorothy E. Leidner
AIS President 2025-2026
Dear AIS Community,
I’m sorry to report that at the age of 87, William R. (“Bill”) King passed away on Thursday, July 23. He left the University of Pittsburgh in 2008, after having made a large number of contributions to the field of Information Systems. His family’s personal obituary shows up at the bottom of this email, and more information can be found in his very colorful and extensive Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Richard_King#.
He earned his PhD and master’s degrees in Operations Research from Case Institute of Technology in 1962, under Russell L. Ackoff. His first academic appointments as Assistant Professor were at Case and Air Force Institutes of Technology. At the University of Pittsburgh, where he spent 41 years, he earned the honor of the title University Professor, well before I arrived in 1985.
He founded AIS by assembling a large group of past ICIS program and conference chairs, to foster a continuing research focus in the Association. He was an AIS LEO, which is the highest lifetime achievement award in AIS, and an AIS Fellow. He was the first President of AIS and its first Executive Director, while running the AIS office with a very small staff of one secretary and one PhD student, until it moved to Georgia State University. He co-founded the International Conference on Information Systems and later the Americas Conference on Information Systems.
Early in the MIS Quarterly’s life, he served as editor-in-chief of and was instrumental in the concept of, and founding of, the Information Systems Research journal. He also served as associate editor for six other journals.
Other associations recognized his achievements. Among many, he was also a Fellow of INFORMS and Decision Sciences International. He was president of TIMS (The Institute of Management Science), and his work led to the establishment of INFORMS in 1995.
He authored or co-authored hundreds of papers, which was a monumental task because many predated personal computers. I personally witnessed how he painstakingly would write out his papers on yellow pads, to be transcribed by a secretary, and then would mark them up for further retyping and revising. I do remember seeing many of his PhD students spending hours hanging around the mailroom (which no longer exists) waiting for the arrival of the mail service, in the hope of receiving more hand-written, filled-out questionnaires from information systems planning executives. Each additional envelope meant that their response rate would be that much higher and their data pool that much more representative of the population.
His research primarily addressed strategic planning for information systems, in which he was a pioneering researcher. He also published prolifically in the areas of knowledge management, organizational learning, business planning, and strategic use of information systems, among others. He also chaired over a hundred PhD dissertation committees, leaving a legacy of many Pitt PhDs who have made their own distinguished careers, earning their own chaired professorships.
Dennis Galletta
Thomas H. O’Brien Professor of Information Systems
Katz Graduate School of Business
University of Pittsburgh