VALLABH SAMBAMURTHY

Talk: Frontiers of IS Research: Promising Directions and Opportunities

Vallabh Sambamurthy (Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1989) is the Eli Broad Professor of Information Technology at the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. He is the founder of the Center for Leadership of the Digital Enterprise (www.bus.msu.edu/clode), a research center at the Broad School that is dedicated to issues associated with the convergence between information technologies and business strategy, business processes, innovation, and governance.  The center was funded through a five-year seed grant from Michigan State University and corporate board memberships.  He has expertise in how firms successfully leverage information technologies in sustaining superior performance through their business strategies, products, services, and organizational processes. He has researched issues related to the impacts of CIO and top management team characteristics on firms’ success with IT assimilation, the impacts of institutional forces on organizational IT assimilation, and the capabilities and factors associated with strategic leverage of IT.  His current research includes the impacts of information technologies on strategic agility and the design of inter-organizational collaboration networks for product design and supply chain systems.  He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Information Systems Research, one of the top journals for research on information systems.

Most of his research has been conducted in Fortune 500 firms and has been funded by the Financial Executives Research Foundation, the Advanced Practices Council (APC), and the National Science Foundation.  The Advanced Practices Council is a group of 25 CIOs of Fortune 500 firms who commission research on topics of relevance to their work.  Sambamurthy has executed four different projects for this group on topics related to the emerging organizational models for the IT function, the design of collaboration relationships between business and IS executives and the management of IT-enabled strategic agility.  In addition to numerous academic publications, he has written executive-oriented articles in the CIO, Optimize, and CIO Insight magazines.  Recently, he co-authored a book on information technology management, titled, Winning the 3-Legged Race: When Business and Technology Run Together, Prentice Hall, 2006.

Sambamurthy teaches courses related to the integration of information technology and corporate strategy. He has been actively involved in executive education on current topics such as facilitating business innovation through information technologies (IT), making sense of the business value of IT, strategic management of IT, and the organizing and sourcing of IT activities, assets, and services in contemporary firms. He has worked as a researcher or consultant with several Fortune 500 firms including 3M, General Dynamics, Owens Corning, Intel, Bell Atlantic, AstraZeneca, Freddie Mac, and BellSouth.

Keynote Speaker (Industry)

TIM BROOKINS

Talk: Five Nines Of Quality: Testing the Devices That Run Your Life

Tim Brookins is a Distinguished Engineer working in the Entertainment & Devices Division.

Brookins joined Microsoft in 2001 as part of the Great Plains Software acquisition and has 20 years of experience in the business applications space. At Great Plains he was instrumental in producing the company's first offering based on Microsoft SQL Server. Brookins also designed the model-driven architecture that enables products from multiple parties to merge seamlessly into a single solution without source code changes. These innovations formed the technical foundation for the successful Great Plains partner ecosystem. In 1997, Brookins was named the first “Technical Fellow" at Great Plains in recognition of his contributions.

After joining Microsoft, Brookins worked for two years in the Developer Division as part of the Microsoft Visual Studio team. He researched CLR-based, model-driven business frameworks with a focus on advanced customization via model extensibility and managed programming models.

Tim is currently working on the Windows Mobile team, contributing to the company’s Windows phone efforts.

He is based at the Microsoft facility in Fargo, N.D. Brookins spends his time interacting with co-workers in Redmond, Wash., and the Microsoft European Development Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, as an advocate of distributed development.

Brookins holds bachelor’s and master’s of science degrees in electrical engineering from North Dakota State University.