Fifth President of AIS: Bob Galliers

When Bob Galliers became the second AIS president from AIS Region 2 he had just stepped down as Dean of Warwick Business School, UK and was a Visiting Professor at INSEAD, France. Following his retirement in 2017, he became Bentley’s University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Professor Emeritus at Warwick and a Visiting Professor at Loughborough University, England. He has since taken up positions as Associate Director and Senior Advisor for EFMD’s Quality Services in Brussels, advising on EQUIS and EFMD programme accreditations.

During his term as AIS President, he focused attention on:

• Helping to extend AIS’s international reach by, e.g., relabelling the AIS Region 1 conference as the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), in line with the pre-existing Region 2 and Region 3 conferences – ECIS and PACIS. 
• Initiating the LEO Awards and the AIS Fellows, to honor outstanding service to our academy and to help ensure that the contributions of those who developed and continue to develop our field would endure. 

He served as Program Co-chair for the 23rd ICIS, Barcelona, Spain, 2002, and as track and panels chair for several ICIS and ECIS. He has given over 60 invited keynote addresses at various conferences, e.g., in Australia (ACIS); Czech Republic (EAIS); Finland (ECIS); India (IFIP); Ireland (IFIP); Israel (MCIS), and the UK (UKAIS).

Prior to his appointment as Provost at Bentley (2002-2009), he was Research Director in the IS Department at the London School of Economics (LSE); Lucas Professor of Business Management Systems and Dean at Warwick Business School, both in the UK, and Foundation Professor and Head of the Department of IS at Curtin University, Western Australia. Galliers began his professional career outside of academia, first in social work administration and then in management consulting.

He has held a number of visiting professorial appointments: in addition to INSEAD and Loughborough University, these include University of St Gallen, Switzerland; National University of Singapore; University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales, Bond University, Australia; Hong Kong City and Polytechnic universities; King’s College, London; LSE, UK; European Institute for Advanced Management Studies, Belgium.

His research focuses principally on the processes and practices of information systems strategizing. He was the founding editor-in-chief of The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, launched in 1991, stepping down at the end of 2018 (2020 IF: 11.022). He has 16 books to his name. The Cambridge Handbook of Qualitative Digital Research is due to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Recent books include Managing Digital Innovation: A Knowledge Perspective (Springer 2020); Strategic Information Management: Theory and Practice 5e (Routledge 2020); The Routledge Companion to Management Information Systems (Routledge, 2017); The Routledge Handbook of Management Information Systems (Routledge, 2015), and The Oxford Handbook of Management Information Systems (Oxford University Press, 2011). He has also authored over 100 articles that have appeared in such leading journals as MISQ, ISJ, JIT, JMIS, EJIS, JMS and LRP. His work has been cited over 15,000 times (as of 2021) according to Google Scholar.

Galliers is a Fellow of AIS, the Royal Society of Arts, and the British Computer Society. He received the LEO Award in 2013.

AB (honors, Economics), 1970, Harvard; MA (distinction, Management Systems), 1976, Lancaster; PhD (Information Systems), 1987, LSE; DSc (honoris causa), 1995, Turku School of Economics & Business Administration, Finland.