Congratulations Graduates

2011-2012 IROM PhD graduates have accepted tenure-track faculty positions all over the world. From the IS group, Huaxia Rui (pictured) is at the University of Rochester, Lizhen Xu is at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Yongsuk Kim is at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. From the SCOM group, Haoying Sun is at Mays Business School at Texas A&M University and Gang Li is at Bentley University. From the RADM group, Yinglu Deng is at Tsinghua University, Tianyang Wang is at Colorado State University and Bo Shi is at Morehead State University. Also, Daniel Zantedeschi is pursuing a post-doc at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Professor William W. Cooper, Pioneer in Operations Research, Dies at 97

IROM Professor Emeritus William W. Cooper, an academic giant widely considered to be the father of management science, died Wednesday, June 20, at 97. In a career that spanned nearly seven decades, Cooper was a prolific researcher who was at the forefront of a new way of studying business, emphasizing scientific rigor and integrating disciplines. Read more from McCombs Today.

Sirkka Jarvenpaa appointed 2012 honorary doctor

Professor Sirkka Jarvenpaa has been appointed as a 2012 honorary doctor at the IT Faculty, University of Gothenburg. Professor Jarvenpaa is the James Bayless/Rauscher Pierce Refsnes Chair in Business Administration and is "one of the most prolific scholars in the field of information systems."

How to Build a Better Team: Trust, Mindfulness, and Flexibility

McCombs Visiting Scholar and IROM Ph.D. alum Holly Lanham worked with Luci Leykum of University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio to study how to build a better workplace team. Read more at Texas Enterprise.

MIS Team Represents McCombs at International Case Competition

Management information systems seniors Kristin Bonds, Victoria Cano-Calhoun, and Lance Polvado represented the McCombs Business School at the International Case Competition held at the University of Minnesota in April. The team worked on a case for the Minnesota Wild hockey team and their struggle to fill seats at their games. How could the team use social media to improve ticket sales and advertising revenue? The team's solution was to reinvent the marketing campaign, which they named "Unleash the Wild". Read more about the case competition.

SCM Student Receives R. Gene Richter Scholarship

Supply chain management student Garrett Hopper is one of 10 students awarded a 2012 R. Gene Richter Scholarship. Hopper spent the 2011 summer at El Paso Corporation in Houston as a supply chain management intern. While there, he worked on several inventory optimization projects, one of which saved the company $50,000 through inventory optimization of one station, which led to savings projections of $3 million to $6 million company-wide. Read more about Hopper's scholarship..

IM Program Entrepreneurship Celebration

Information technology is enabling value creation at an incredible rate. New companies, alliances, value chains, and business models are emerging as a result; information systems are the engine of innovation and entrepreneurship. The UT IM Program and the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship celebrated IM and UT entrepreneurs at the first-ever IM Entrepreneur Celebration (IMEC) on Friday, April 20, 2012.

Bursting the Bubble of Assumptions about 'Sponsored Research'

• 2011 News

  Dyer appointed to National Academies committee

  Professor Jim Dyer was appointed to a National Academies project committee, Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Global Nuclear Detection Architecture. Read more about the project here.

   

   

  
  

  Tuttle receives Texas Exes Teaching Award

  MIS Lecturer Clint Tuttle is the McCombs School of Business recipient of the 2012 Texas Exes Teaching Award. The award is student-nominated and student-selected. His teaching assistant, Vinay Mohan, was chosen as the McCombs recipient of the 2012 TA/AI award. All recipients will be honored at a ceremony on February 21 at the Alumni Center. Visit Texas Exes to learn more about the organization.
  
  

  Paper Garners Honorable Mention by Decision Sciences Journal

  Professor Steve Gilbert and two former doctoral students (Liwen Chen and Yusen Xia) received an honorable mention for the 2011 Decision Sciences Journal Best Paper Award for their article, “Private Labels: Facilitators or Impediments to Supply Chain Coordination.” The paper was recognized for its exceptional managerial significance, high level of intellectual stimulation, and academic contribution. To see all awards, visit the Decision Sciences Awards site.
  
  

  Passion Comes from Emphasizing Detachment of Learning from Grades

  "Teaching cannot and should not be about penalizing students for mistakes, but it should be about rewarding the learning." Prabhudev Konana, recently appointed chairman of the IROM department, spoke to India Abroad recently. Read more

   

  Business' Digital Transformation

  "To Andrew Whinston — professor, Hugh Roy Cullen Centennial Chair in Business Administration, and director of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce at the McCombs School of Business — Google is a prime example of how to survive in the $1.5 trillion world of e-commerce. Economics has always involved creative destruction, a process in which old industries crumble as new ones arise. But never have the waves of creative destruction churned as fast or as furiously as in the Internet economy." Read More
  
  

  Patrick Brockett Invited to Join Prestigious Committee

  Professor Patrick Brockett, who holds the Gus Wortham Memorial Chair in Risk Management and Insurance, has been invited to join the prestigious task force committee of the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council. The committee will study issues associated with levees in the context of the National Flood Insurance Program. The study is sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Read More
  
  

  Ying He Wins 2011 DAS Student Paper Award

  Ying He, a Risk Analysis & Decision Making PhD student, won the 2011 Decision Analysis Society Student Paper Award. Out of 62 submissions and six finalists, his "Utility Functions Representing Preference over Interdependent Attributes" took the top prize.
  
  

  'Just-in-Time' Production Dodges Disaster

  Part of an overall “lean” strategy to streamline the manufacturing process, companies using the just-in-time approach keep small amounts of inventory, often just what is needed on a given day. But when entire manufacturing facilities were shut down due to the earthquake, the ramifications were felt worldwide. Yet many companies recovered quickly, since lean strategy also holds that companies who use lean supply chains develop disaster preparedness plans, explains Sridhar Seshadri, professor of information, risk, and operations management at McCombs. Read More

  

  Borrowed Sugar Lends a Lifeline for Living Local

  Finance senior and Product Manager Kelley Rytlewski took on a product management role in the spring and sought out Associate Professor Edward Anderson of McCombs for guidance. “He is the professor of an operations management class, and he is great at agile development,” she says. “He gave me blogs and books to read and even helped me with my spreadsheets. He showed me that professors are excited to see us applying what they’ve taught us in the classroom.” Read more...

  
  

  

  Konana Voted Outstanding Professor by Dallas/Fort Worth MBA Class of 2011

  Prabhudev Konana, professor of information management at McCombs, was voted Outstanding Professor by graduating students in the Dallas/Fort Worth MBA Program. Students vote for the professor who has displayed outstanding support and assistance to their class. Read more...

   

  

  UT Course Takes Students to the Birthplace of Consumer Products

  Leading the group was Michael Hasler, a lecturer in the department of information, risk, and operations management at the University of Texas. He developed the course with an executive from Target to teach the students such skills as process analysis, statistical process control, queuing theory, and inventory models. Read more...
  
  

   

  

  Brockett Receives Excellence in Teaching Award

  Patrick Brockett, Professor of Management Science and Information Systems, Mathematics and Finance, was chosen as this year’s recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award from The American Risk and Insurance Association (ARIA). Read more...

   

  
  

  

  Deloitte, Target, and General Motors Set Example for Corporate Involvement at McCombs

  Professor Michael Hasler and Target executives took to heart Dean Tom Gilligan's strategic initiative to increase experiential learning opportunities for students. Read more...

   

   

  

  Does Research Matter? Business Leaders Say Yes

  It probably wouldn't surprise anyone who knows Leon Lasdon that he's the subject of a trivia question for operations research and management science geeks. Read more...

   

   

  

  RSVP with Event Planning Guru Lo

  Cindy Lo, BBA '98, graduated from McCombs with an MIS degree and went straight to the technology industry before switching gears completely and launching her own special events planning company. Red Velvet Events. Read more...

   

   

  

  Kumar Muthuraman Wins Best Paper Award

  Kumar Muthuraman, Associate Professor in the Information, Risk, and Operations Management department, won the Best Applied Paper Prize in Operations Engineering and Analysis from IIE Transactions. Read more...

   

   

  

  Digital Tech Pioneer Andrew Whinston Ranked Most Influential MIS Researcher

  Andrew B. Whinston, professor in the Department of Information, Risk, and Operations Management, has been identified as the most influential researcher in the field of management information systems in a study that measures the productivity and impact of published work by scientists and scholars using a yardstick called the h-index. Read more...
  
  
  

  

  Smart Use of Data Drives Dollars

  "Peer inside any Fortune 1000 company and you'll see data everywhere, most of it quite timely and accurate," says IT researcher Anitesh Barua. “But data doesn’t give you a competitive advantage. For that you need other attributes like intelligence, usability, accessibility and mobility, and we now have the research results to convince CEOs and CFOs of that.” Read more...

  
  

   McCombs Continues Strength in 2011 U.S. News Rankings

  Informations Systems is ranked 3rd for the 12th year in a row. Read more...