Biography

Rob Kauffman is currently Director of the MIS Research Center, Professor of Information and Decision Sciences, and Chair of the Information and Decision Sciences Department. Prior to joining the faculty at the Carlson School of Management in 1994, he held the ranks of Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at the Stern School of Business, New York University from 1988 to 1994. He was also a visiting Associate Professor at the Simon Graduate School of Business of the University of Rochester, and a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. He received a doctorate in industrial administration at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (now the Tepper School of Business) at Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation, entitled “Measuring the Business Value of Information Technologies Which Deliver Financial Services,” was recognized among the best doctoral dissertations of the year in the 1988 International Conference on Information Systems. A portion of that work was published in a book entitled Measuring the Business Value of Information Technology (ICIT Press, Washington, DC, 1988, co-authored with P. Keen, P. Strassmann, B. Swanson, P. Berger and C. Kriebel). His second book, Strategic Information Technology Management: Organizational Growth and Competitive Advantage , appeared in 1993 (Idea Group Publishing, Harrisburg, PA, co-authored with Rajiv Banker and Mo Mahmood).

Since then, Rob's research has been published in many journals and conferences, including MIS Quarterly , Information Systems Research , IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Organization Science, International Journal of Electronic Commerce , Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce , Electronic Markets , Decision Sciences , Management Science , Journal of Management Information Systems , and Communications of the ACM . He also has won the equivalent of the “grand slam” of conference best research paper awards and recognitions in the field of Information Systems, including the International Conference on Information Systems (1988 and 2000), the Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (1999), the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (1991 and 2004), the American Conference on Information Systems (2000), and the INFORMS Conference on Information Systems and Technology (2003).

Background: “My professional background prior to beginning work on my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon was in corporate finance and international lending, strategic planning and consulting. I began my career, fresh out of Cornell University in 1979 with a master's degree in international studies, in an international loan officer training program with the Irving Trust Company (now The Bank of New York) at “Number One” Wall Street, New York. I did training rotations to gain experience in international credit, strategic planning, East Asian and African lending, and multinational finance, before being assigned to the Western European Division for lending and M&A analysis work. Many of the bank's largest European banking customers were located in New York City. I became involved in “Project 1980s,” an internally-developed consulting team that assessed the transformation of the international clearing marketplace and the future of international banking operations, in light of changes that IT was creating at the time. Project 1980s was intended to be the platform for formulating the bank's strategic plan to expand its capabilities to obtain large-scale clearing accounts and achieve competitive advantage with IT.”

”Since the international banks located in New York City were among the most sophisticated users of IT, I had a unique opportunity to experience the technological transformations and the changing business landscape up close—with interpretive help from international banking professionals, technology vendors and government regulators. I took away an appreciation of how IT changes business processes, managerial decision making, risk management, product development and industry structure, as well as an appreciation of the importance of life-long learning skills. I also learned how to effectively explore the leading IS/IT issues that senior managers want to know more about. This experience continues to inform the work I do every day as a university professor, researcher and teacher, and the advice that I give as a mentor to others who are interested in pursuing a career in university research and teaching.”

Research Interests: “My research interests have grown and developed over time. I continue to pursue senior management issues involving IT investments, business value and organizational impacts, software development and project management, and financial services use of IT. I also have a significant amount of background in the reference disciplines of economics and econometrics and statistics, but spend a lot of time working with ideas from strategic management and marketing, and methods from biostatistics that are new to my field. My current research efforts are more focused on the changes that technology has brought about in market structure, inter-firm competition, interorganizational system ownership, supply chain management and procurement, risk management and operational control, and technology adoption decision making in the presence of standards. I am also especially active in research that uses “massive quasi-experimental research methods” for the study of the performance of Internet auctions, Internet-based selling and strategic pricing, and the performance of different kinds of mechanism designs in e-commerce (e.g., group buying on the Internet, electronic call markets for auctioning fixed income securities), online discounting in groceries, price rigidity and menu costs, and information transparency in the sale of airline tickets). I also do editorial service work at the leading journals in my field, and organize scientific conferences that support the exchange of leading edge research ideas. I also like to work with organizations on problems that are of the greatest interest to senior managers.”

Current Research Projects: “During the past year, I completed a 50 th year anniversary survey article on IS research that was recently published in Management Science (March 2004, co-authored with Rajiv Banker). With that effort in my “rear view mirror,” I look forward this year to expanding my involvement with MISRC member companies. One MISRC project will involve the study of RFID (radio frequency identification) in supply chain management and retailing. My partners in this effort will be fellow faculty member, Fred Riggins, and MISRC visiting research fellow, Chulmo Koo, from Korea. Another IDSc faculty member, Mani Subramani, and I will partner to initiate a second MISRC research project on international outsourcing, and the various issues that arise around it. Some of them include changes in organizational culture, the management of risk, outsourcing vendor selection and contracting, transfers of knowledge, impacts on firm performance and profitability, and the changes that are being experienced in the IS workforce in the United States and elsewhere. I also will be working on a new project on the performance of Internet-based electronic markets for fixed income security issuance and trading with doctoral student Ping Wu, MISRC visiting research fellow Yaobin Lu from China, and IDSc faculty member Alok Gupta. I also plan to jointly study the latency of business value flows from IT investments with Kim Huat Goh, an MISRC doctoral research fellow from Singapore, who started his Ph.D. here in 2003.”

”Writing and collaboration are two of the joys of my working life. So another priority for me is to have other research that I have been involved in during the past several years published in the leading journals in my field. They include research on: the agency-influenced performance of Web-based airline reservation-making systems; strategic alliance-making strategies among B2B e-procurement market intermediaries; the business value implications of design choices in the Internet-based sale of groceries; failure and survival strategies among Internet firms; international adoption of digital wireless phone technologies; theories for the ownership of interorganizational IS assets; and strategy formulation for maximizing firm when information sharing occurs between buyers and suppliers in supply chain management.”

General Impressions: “Working at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, and taking on leadership roles in the Information and Decision Sciences Department and the MIS Research Center have been wonderful opportunities for me. During the 10 years I've been in Minnesota, I've been able to grow my capabilities and experience in IS research and teaching, and hone my skills as a scholar and leader to achieve global recognition. I've also been able to do some of the most interesting and innovative work on technology and e-commerce strategy and IS/IT senior management issues in my career as a university professor. What has made this possible is the positive environment that the school maintains in support of research, the challenges it offers faculty for blending relevance and rigor in teaching and research, and the collegial relationships that exist among faculty who are absolutely tops in their areas of coverage. Another of the special aspects of this school is the privilege that the faculty have to work on collaborative research with the outstanding students in our doctoral program. My department has graduated many students who have gone on to become faculty at top business schools, endowed research chairs, journal editors, and recognized leaders in the IS field. Our location amidst the Minneapolis-St. Paul business community and the willingness of senior managers to offer access for organizational research on IS and IT is unmatched anyplace else in the United States.”

For contact information, please visit the IDSc Faculty Information Page.