School of Information Sciences Industry Advisory Council (SIS IAC)

Ronald L. Larsen, Dean and Professor

Welcome to the School of Information Sciences (SIS) Industry Advisory Council (IAC) website. I encourage you to participate in the IAC and help SIS improve its educational offerings and relations with your company and others.

The IAC goals are to 1) deepen relations with corporate partners and 2) provide a strategic touchstone and "reality check" for SIS as we continually refine our degree programs and research directions. To reach these goals, we have conceived the IAC as a business roundtable breakfast. Additionally, we believe that the roundtable format should also provide ample opportunities for corporate partners to gain from interactions with other business members and SIS faculty.

The characteristics that we desire in our IAC are:

• Deeply participatory conversation
• Topics of mutual value
  
• Commitment to regular participation
  
• Willingness to dialogue between meetings
  
• Value to all parties

To facilitate highly participatory conversation on topics of mutual value we have designed the IAC to be a small group. Our meeting target size is a dozen total, professionals and academics together (but excluding from the count support staff). We feel that the breakfast roundtable, stoked with enough coffee, prompted by a brief faculty background piece framed as a question, will ensure lively conversation. The early topics will be those that have arisen repeatedly in our conversations with you and others in business: Security, Leadership, Off-Shoring. During the course of our relationships we will gather fresh future topics of mutual interest.

By investing in the idea of a small IAC, we are asking members for a commitment of time and energy. Absentees will be greatly missed. And while some degree of absenteeism is of course inevitable, we want you to attend each and every meeting… it is exactly your experience and perspective that will make the IAC valuable. To help you size up this commitment, we have specified meetings three times per year to be announced well in advance, a central downtown location with easy parking, and breakfast time as the time least likely to interfere with your professional or personal schedule.

We believe that a natural outgrowth of IAC meetings will be a degree of ongoing dialogue between and across all members, professionals and academics. We hope that such dialogue and relationships will be welcome and valuable to all.