Please join us in cordially congratulating Dr. Roger H.L. Chiang (University of Cincinnati), the 2023 AIS SIGSAND Outstanding Contribution Award (ASOCA) Winner. Roger H.L. Chiang has made numerous and extensive contributions to the systems analysis and design community and The 2020-2023 AIS SIGSAND Executive Committee were unanimous in choosing him the 2023 ASOCA Award recipient.
Below is Rogers’s autobiography (with links added by SIGSAND):
Teachers have been the most influential people in my life. They have made significant impacts on my academic career. I decided to pursue an academic career when I was 14 years old, which surprised my parents, but it remains one of my most important decisions. In achieving this goal, I completed BS in Management Science, MS in Computer Science and Business Administration, and Ph.D. in Computers and Information Systems. I began my academic career in 1993 as a visiting assistant professor at Syracuse University and retired in 2023 from the University of Cincinnati.
Database reverse engineering is my Ph.D. dissertation. I developed a novel database reverse engineering method and a prototyping system for its implementation. Through a combination of database schema and data instance analysis, an extended Entity-Relationship model is derived, which is semantically richer and more comprehensible for maintenance and design purposes than the original database. My dissertation was the first to consider database schemas and data instances to infer domain semantics and represent the discovered semantics as a conceptual model. It is an early-stage data mining research, initially called knowledge discovery in databases. Systems analysis and design (SAND) is a forward engineering process that moves from the requirement collection to the final implementation design of an information system. I studied how to reverse the forward engineering process and recover design requirements and specifications of databases. During my 30 years of academic career, my dissertation work continuously leads to new research topics in discovering domain semantics (i.e., domain knowledge) from various information sources/systems and in different formats.
Website: https://business.uc.edu/faculty-and-research/departments/obais/faculty/roger-chiang.html
GoogleScholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=ZIC1_xEAAAAJ
Publications
Over the years, Roger published numerous seminal papers on systems analysis and design in top journals and conferences. We invite you to read his publications on GoogleScholar and ResearchGate.
Below, we provide three of Roger’s papers:
I selected these three articles because they reflect different topics among my range of interests in the SIGSAND community.
1. Chen, P.P.S., 1976. The entity-relationship model—toward a unified view of data. ACM transactions on database systems (TODS), 1(1), pp. 9-36.
It is a seminal article on conceptual modeling. I have read it numerous times to conduct my research. This groundbreaking and pioneering research is the foundation of my Ph.D. dissertation work, and I recommend SAND researchers read it at least once.
2. Wand, Y. and Weber, R., 2002. Research commentary: information systems and conceptual modeling—a research agenda. Information systems research, 13(4), pp. 363-376.
I identify this article as the representative of more than 20 years of research done by Yair Wand and Ron Weber in establishing the ontological foundation – a theory of the deep structure of information systems. I have read many of their publications on the ontological foundation. To me, their ontological publications are more like the philosophical foundation of information systems. Their ontological publications significantly influence information systems researchers in conducting SAND-related work.
3. Chiang, R.H., Barron, T.M. and Storey, V.C., 1994. Reverse engineering of relational databases: Extraction of an EER model from a relational database. Data & knowledge engineering, 12(2), pp. 107-142.
I also identify this most cited publication of my Ph.D. dissertation work. A Ph.D. dissertation is like your first lover whom you are willing to do so many things and try every possible way to accomplish it. Competing my Ph.D. dissertation encourages me to continuously challenge the status quo, which I recognized many years later that “challenge the status quo” is also my personality.
Interview with Roger
Roger kindly agreed to answer our questions, which we feel are especially relevant for anyone interested in systems analysis and design research.
Q1: Notable paper in SAND
Considering the long history of SAND publications, which one particular paper stands out for you, and why? What makes this paper special to SAND?
Roger H.L. Chiang:
I would like to answer this question by identifying three papers in sequence instead of one only.
- Chen, P.P.S., 1976. The entity-relationship model—toward a unified view of data. ACM transactions on database systems (TODS), 1(1), pp. 9-36.
- Wand, Y. and Weber, R., 2002. Research commentary: information systems and conceptual modeling—a research agenda. Information systems research, 13(4), pp. 363-376.
- Recker, J.C., Lukyanenko, R., Jabbari Sabegh, M., Samuel, B. and Castellanos, A., 2021. From representation to mediation: a new agenda for conceptual modeling research in a digital world. MIS Quarterly: Management Information Systems, 45(1), pp. 269-300.
These three papers represent the long research journey of conceptual modeling that advances from the original publication by Peter Chen on the Entity-Relationship model, the research agenda proposed by Yair Wand and Ron Weber for the information systems discipline, to the MISQ publication by Recker et al. in challenging the status quo of conceptual modeling and moving forward to propose a broader vision and role of conceptual modeling. Conceptual modeling is one of the few pillars of SAND research, and I believe that the conceptual modeling research conducted by SAND researchers will continuously contribute to IS discipline.
Q2: Topic of a SAND Dissertation
If you were to do a Ph.D. on the topic of systems analysis and design today, what would the title of that dissertation be? What would the dissertation be about? Why?
Roger H.L. Chiang:
I like to conduct two possible topics.
1: The Philosophy of SAND.
As a discipline matures, its research communities may want to reflect on the epistemological underpinnings of their research before proposing how the discipline can evolve and advance. SAND researchers can become philosophers of SAND. This implies the need to reflect and discuss how to conduct SAND as research progresses from the organizational to societal context. This contemplation allows SAND researchers to bridge the current to future research work.
Philosophy uses descriptors to explain the observation and the understanding of a research area. SAND researchers use descriptors, perhaps without even realizing they are doing so. Descriptors serve various purposes, e.g., guiding Ph.D. students in conducting SAND research and explaining our work to researchers in other areas. This dissertation establishes SAND descriptors for developing evolving information systems in the societal context.
2: From Organizations to Society: The Expanded Scope of Systems Analysis and Design
To develop evolving information systems (IS) in addressing societal needs, we should extend at least three SAND dimensions: users, designers, and the context.
The evolving IS, including various sociotechnical systems, expands the context dimension from operations to organizations, and on to society. For the user dimension, users of traditional IS were primarily internal, organizational employees who use information systems to support their work and decision-making. However, users of evolving IS, such as social media platforms, include users outside the organizations and in the general public. With technological advances and other dimension expansions, the designer dimension needs to expand accordingly. The scope of designers’ expertise (knowledge and abilities) in analyzing and developing evolving IS should expand from IT expertise to business/domain knowledge to include social understanding. This dissertation should identify interesting and emerging SAND research topics according to the expanded scope of SAND from organizations to society.
Q3: SAND in the Future
When you think about SAND 10 years from now (i.e., around the year 2030), what do you think would be the most actively researched topic then? Why?
Roger H.L. Chiang:
I really cannot predict what could be the most actively researched SAND topic in 2033. However, according to what I have studied in the past few years, I believe that business organizations and society expect information systems to derive societal value without inducing harmful results. SAND research should investigate how to include, consider, and address societal issues in developing evolving information systems. SAND research should study how to prevent the harm and negative consequences that can be resulted from the implementation of evolving IS in the societal context.
Thank you, Roger!
Once again, we would like to congratulate Dr. Roger H.L. Chiang on receiving the 2023 ASOCA award and wish to extend our profound gratitude to him for his outstanding service and his intellectual and pedagogical contributions to SAND, and our society, broadly! Thank you, Roger!
