Thirteenth President of AIS:  Dennis F. Galletta

Dennis Galletta has long been active in AIS and ICIS. In addition to his contributions as president, he is a founding co-editor-in-chief of the AIS Transactions on HCI, and co-chair of ICIS 2012 in Shanghai. He was chair of the first AMCIS meeting (Pittsburgh 1995), program co-chair of ICIS and AMCIS meetings, ran the AIS Salary Survey since 1998, and was a member of council as VP of Member Services and as Americas representative.

Dennis Galletta’s term as president focused on improving the value of AIS. Task forces explored how to increase membership value and worked on issues of member diversity. To increase membership, the council decided to include practitioners as an important additional membership category. This move now enables student chapters to provide a "membership path” for future practitioners, and allows graduates to serve as industry contacts for our current students and for faculty.

To address the IS enrollment downturns in the early 21st century, a committee created and maintained an AIS wiki for storing materials and strategies for student recruitment. He created a brochure "Picture yourself studying Information Systems” for co-branding with interested schools. Further, a student video competition was held, and a Second Life half-island was purchased. To increase value to members globally, an AIS discussion forum was created entitled "What in the World can AIS do for you?” The AISWorld and AIS websites were integrated.

AIS adopted the Senior Scholars’ "Basket” of six top IS journals and featured it prominently on the AIS website. Including six journals in the basket was seen as a solution to enhance the chances for tenure and promotion of academics in a relatively new field in which the quality assessments of journals was previously highly variable across universities. The basket includes our own Journal of AIS, providing welcome recognition of the journal’s quality.

After a career as a CPA, he and began his doctoral studies in MIS in 1980 at the University of Minnesota, while serving as research associate for the University’s MIS Research Center. Upon graduating in 1985, he moved to the University of Pittsburgh where he is a professor of business administration. In the warm months, He teaches Electronic Commerce Strategies and Human Factors in Information Systems Design in Harvard University’s summer program in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Dennis Galletta is an active researcher. His three major research streams are:

• Cognitive fit, where he and Iris Vessey conducted the first study 
• Spreadsheet error-finding 
• Human factors of electronic commerce

He is the author of three books, 37 refereed journal articles, and 40 refereed conference papers. The journal articles have appeared in outlets such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, Journal of MIS, Journal of AIS, Decision Sciences, Data Base, European Journal of Information Systems, Communications of the ACM (CACM), and Accounting, Management, and Information Technologies.

He has addressed audiences in the United States, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, France, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, and even aboard a ship in the 1999 Semester at Sea program sailing around the world.

He has been or is a member of many editorial boards including Information Systems Research (AE), MIS Quarterly (AE), Journal of MIS (AE), Journal of AIS (SE), Data Base (SE), Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences (AE), and Information Systems and E-Business Management.

A charter member of AIS, he serves or has served in a wide variety of service capacities for AIS, ICIS, and AISWorld beyond those listed above. In chronological order, they include:

• Local arrangements chair, ICIS Doctoral Consortium (1987) 
• Treasurer, ICIS (1994 -1998) 
• Assembled the procedures for the first electronic submissions in any major IS conference (AMCIS 1995) and designed and implemented the first Web registration system for ICIS (1996) 
• Created and maintained the first AIS web site (1996-1998) 
• Page editor, Graduate Programs in MIS on the AIS website (1996 to date) 
• Chair of the committee that selected Georgia State University as the AIS headquarters location (1997) 
• Performed the first ICIS internal audit and eventually recovered nearly $150,000 in ICIS funds (1997-2000) 
• Conceptualized, designed, and implemented the system of special interest groups for AIS (2000-2002) 
• Member, AISWorld Awards Committee (2003 to date)

His honors include selection as a fellow of AIS.

He is an avid photographer, with special interests in portraiture, lightning, fireworks, and macro photography (especially with flowers, small insects, and spiders). For the past three years, he waited on the bank of the Charles River by MIT for 10 hours on the 4th of July just to obtain a prime seat for fireworks and their reflections in the water. He also has interests in videography, mobile technology, and home theater systems.

BS (Accounting), 1974, and MBA, (1978), Gannon University (formerly Gannon College); Ph.D. (Management Information Systems), 1985, University of Minnesota.