Please join us in cordially congratulating Dr. Jeffrey Parsons (Memorial University of Newfoundland), the 2020 AIS SIGSAND Outstanding Contribution Award (ASOCA) Winner. Jeffrey Parsons has made numerous and extensive contributions to the systems analysis and design community and The 2020-2022 AIS SIGSAND Executive Committee were unanimous in choosing him and Dinesh Batra as the 2020 ASOCA Award recipients.
Jeffrey Parsons is University Research Professor and Professor of Information Systems in the Faculty of Business Administration at Memorial University of Newfoundland.
His research interests include conceptual modeling, crowdsourcing, information quality, data integration, and recommender systems. His work on these topics has appeared in top journals in several disciplines, including Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, ACM Transactions on Database Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Nature, and Conservation Biology. He is a Senior Editor for MIS Quarterly, a former Senior Editor for the Journal of the Association for Information System, and a former Associate Editor for Information Systems Research.
He has been awarded the designation of Schoeller Senior Fellow from the Schoeller Research Center (Nuremberg, Germany) and that of ER Fellow from the International Conference on Conceptual Modeling.
Publications
Over the years, Jeffrey published numerous highest quality research 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 his favorite papers on SAND:
Wand, Y and R. Weber (1993). On the ontological expressiveness of information systems analysis and design grammars. Information Systems Journal, 3(4), 217-237. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2575.1993.tb00127.x
Germonprez, M., D. Hovorka, and F. Collopy (2007). A theory of tailorable technology design. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 8(6), 351-367. https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol8/iss6/21/
Hevner, A., S. March, J. Park, and S. Ram (2004). Design science research in information systems. MIS Quarterly, 28(1), 75-105. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25148625
Interview with Jeffrey
Jeffrey 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?
Jeffrey Parsons:
Taken broadly, Chen’s (1976) paper introducing the Entity Relationship model created an entire industry. It is covered in any basic textbook on database management or systems analysis and design. Many tools exist to support the creation of ER diagrams. Consultants regularly help organizations develop conceptual schemas using the ER model. An entire field of research has arisen around the ER model, including a dedicated conference (the ER conference). As of August 2020, the paper has almost 12,000 citations [on GoogleScholar].
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?
Jeffrey Parsons:
“Beyond Organizations: Conceptual Modeling for Open Information Systems”
Systems analysis and design was originally invented in the context of developing information systems that primarily operated within the controlled boundaries of an organization. Today, we rely heavily on information systems that connect organizations to their environments. This creates difficulty in developing a conceptual model that is useful to both the organization and those outside the organization who interact with its information systems. As a result, new conceptual modeling approaches are needed to develop effective and flexible systems to operate in these environments.
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?
Jeffrey Parsons:
Predicting the future is dangerous. However, changes happening around us point to what might be coming in a few years. Right now, everyone is talking about AI (which has essentially become equated with machine learning). One of the biggest challenges in extracting usable insight from data using machine learning is abstracting the outputs of a model in a way that can be understood by humans. I believe there is a role for conceptual modeling in helping solve this problem. Perhaps in ten years, machines will be able to extract conceptual models from large data sets, but right now I believe there is an important role for modelers in making sense of the output of machine learning.
Thank you, Jeffrey!
Once again, we would like to congratulate Jeffrey Parsons on receiving the 2020 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, Jeff!
