Ralph H. Sprague, Jr.
Professor
Department of Information
Technology Management
College of Business Administration
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Office Phone Number: (808) 956-7082
sprague@hawaii.edu
Ph.D., Indiana University, Quantitative
Business Analysis
TEACHING AREAS: IS95.01,
IS95.03, O-11, O-16
RESEARCH AREAS: Decision
support systems: design, structure, usage, etc.. Electronic document
management. Management of information systems.
Biographical Sketch
Ralph Sprague is Professor of Information
Technology Management in the College of Business Administration at the
University of Hawaii. He has over 30 years of experience in teaching, research,
and consulting in the use of computers and information technologies in
organizations. His specialties are Decision Support Systems, Strategic Systems
Planning, the Management of Information Systems, and Electronic Document
Management.
He has published dozens of articles and books
on these topics. His framework article on Decision Support Systems was one of
the 25 most cited works in the Information Systems field in the 1980s. A
citation analysis during that time showed that he was one of the ten most
influential authors in the field of Management Information Systems. His book on
DSS, co-authored with Eric Carlson, has been translated into Japanese and
Portugese. His book on Information Systems Management with Barbara McNurlin,
currently in seventh edition, is a leading text on that subject, and has been
translated into Chinese.
He has consulted and lectured extensively in
the United States, Europe, Middle East, Australia, Asia, and South Africa.
Consulting clients include Xerox, Apple, IBM, Coca-Cola of Australia, Fujitsu,
Bank of America, the Governments of Egypt and Israel, and many others.
He is the founder and Chairman (for the first
ten years), of the Department of Decision Sciences at the University of Hawaii.
This department was rated the top department in the United States in the field
of Decision Support Systems. He is also the founder and former Director of the
Pacific Research Institute for Information Systems and Management (PRIISM), an
institute to investigate the primary issues in Information Technology in the
Asia/Pacific Region He has also held academic positions at Anderson College,
University of Maryland, University of Colorado, City Universty of Hong Kong,
University of Freiburg, and Stanford University.
He spent a year as Visiting Research Fellow
at the Institute for the Future, in Menlo Park. California, while on sabbatical
leave from the University. In this capacity, he worked with several firms on
Strategic Systems Planning and the development of Electronic Document Management
Systems. He serves on the Xerox Executive Advisory Forum, a group of Chief
Information Officers to interact with Xerox in the development of document
systems. More recently, he spent a year at Xerox PARC working on projects in
knowledge management and knowledge sharing, and document mining.
He has served as Chairman or Co-chairman of
the Hawaii International Conference on
System Sciences (HICSS) for the past 30 years. HICSS has become one of the
top international conferences on computers and systems. It is unique in
combining computer science and organizational information systems in a high
level interdisciplinary conference. HICSS papers are regularly published in
special issues of reputable journals and in the Information Systems Book Series
published by the IEEE Computer Society Press.
Current Projects:
Electronic Document Management
Harnessing information technology to manage
documents is one of the most important challenges facing I/S managers in this
decade. It is important because most of the valuable information in
organizations is in the forms of documents such as business forms, reports,
letters, memos, policy statements, contracts, agreements, etc. Moreover, most
of the important business processes in organizations are based on, or driven
by, document flows. Electronic Document Management (EDM) promises major
productivity and performance increases by applying new technology to documents
and document processing.
The potential value of applying technology to document management is
significant. Because documents contain concepts and ideas, EDM promises
enhanced support and improved productivity for managers and professionals who
deal primarily with concepts and ideas. And because documents are the primary
vehicle for business processes, EDM promises to make a major contribution to
process redesign and improvement efforts.
The purposes of this project are to show the value of new technology for
managing documents, to illustrate the variety of ways this value can be
realized, to develop some structure for understanding this rapidly evolving
field, and to suggest some actions I/S managers can take now to prepare for
this revolution in information management.
Click here to see the article entitled
"Electronic Document Management: Challenges and Opportunities for
Information Systems Managers" from the March 1995 issue of the MIS
Quarterly.
Click here to see the article entitled "The Electronic Document: A New Frontier for Corporate
IS" from the June 1997 issue of I.S. Business Partners. This is a .pdf
file, click Adobe
Acrobat Reader to download this plug-in; as necessary.
Click here to see the Keynote
Address from the September 1998 Australian Conference on Information Systems
Class Materials:
. Bus 630 Class schedule
for Fall 2008
ITM 366 Class Schedule
for Fall 2008
2404 Maile Way, Honolulu, HI 96744
Phone: (808) 956-7082 Fax: (808) 956-9889
sprague@hawaii.edu