Please join us in cordially congratulating Dr. Glenn Browne (Texas Tech University), the 2022 AIS SIGSAND Outstanding Contribution Award (ASOCA) Winner. Glenn Browne 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 the 2021 ASOCA Award recipient.
Below is Glenn’s autobiography (with links added by SIGSAND):
I was born in Baltimore, MD and grew up in Indiana and Ohio. My undergraduate degree is from the University of Michigan, I have graduate degrees from Ohio State University, and my Ph.D. is in Information & Decision Sciences from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. I taught at three universities during my career and retired from Texas Tech University in August 2021. Two overarching themes have characterized my research. The first is the search for and elicitation of information from decision makers and users of systems. Early in my career most of my research was in decision sciences, primarily working to understand elicitation of information for probability assessment, but also including other topics such as calibration, reasoning, judgment, and perceived variability. Later, I applied my knowledge of elicitation to information requirements determination for systems development, and I did a great deal of work in this area. The second theme has been stopping rules for gathering information, which is in one sense the other side of elicitation. When do people have enough information to stop searching and either move to the next phase of decision making or make an ultimate choice? And what heuristic rules do they use to stop? These are critical questions in an age of information abundance, which characterizes most important decisions today. My teaching has been varied, but I mostly taught managerial decision making, project management, and systems analysis in my career.
I am fortunate to have had many excellent research and teaching colleagues during my career, including many from the SIGSAND community. Much of my success is attributable to my interactions with these colleagues, and the SIGSAND symposia I attended were some of the best intellectual interactions of my career.
Publications
Over the years, Glenn 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 Glenn’s papers:
I selected these three articles because they reflect different topics among my range of interests in the SIGSAND community.
1. Browne, Glenn J. and Mitzi G. Pitts. “Stopping Rule Use During Information Search in Design Problems.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 95, 2004, pp. 208-224.
2. Appan, Radha, and Glenn J. Browne. “The Impact of Analyst-Introduced ‘Misinformation’ on the Requirements Elicitation Process.” MIS Quarterly, 36, 2012, pp. 85-106. This paper is available here.
3. Browne, Glenn J. and Eric A. Walden. “Is There a Genetic Basis for Information Search Propensity? A Genotyping Experiment.” MIS Quarterly, 44(2), 2020, pp. 747-770.
Interview with Glenn
Glenn 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?
Glenn Browne:
There are, of course, dozens of possible candidates for this question. A particular favorite of mine is:
Allen, G. and Parsons, J. “Is Query Reuse Potentially Harmful? Anchoring and Adjustment in Adapting Existing Database Queries.” Information Systems Research, 21(1), 2010, pp. 56-77. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.1080.0189
This article is special because the authors use a mainstream behavioral decision making construct, anchoring and adjustment, in an information systems context, use appropriate analyses that include decision-making metrics, and have very interesting results. Additionally, readers might pay special attention to the methodology, as it was exceptionally inventive in my opinion. It is an excellent article all around.
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?
Glenn Browne:
“Gathering Requirements for Systems Development from Users with Limited Attention and No Contents in Long-Term Memory.” One of the most important challenges facing systems developers today is the dramatic change in the ways users process information and use their memories. Research has shown that many young people today do not learn information because, they say, “I can always google it.” Additionally, the prevalence of internet addiction among many adults, particularly (but hardly exclusively) younger users, means that gaining and holding the precious attention resource is likely to be more difficult and more fleeting. What are the implications of these issues for systems analysis and design? The easy answer is that analysts and systems developers will adapt, as humans have always adapted to changing circumstances. However, I believe that the adaptation in this case will be more difficult than past necessary adaptations because the nature of the problems, that is, the outsourcing of memory and in many cases thinking, reasoning, and judgment in general, is almost unprecedented in human history. The only clear historical precedent to my knowledge is Gutenberg’s introduction of movable type, which also introduced an outsourcing of human long-term memory. Lessons from that invention are long forgotten, and it’s worth noting that it did not also engender the deficits and misallocations of attention currently occurring. Dissertations addressing this topic are likely to be of interest not only to academics, but also systems development companies and people who design public policies.
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?
Glenn Browne:
I believe there are many good answers to this question as well. Gathering, analyzing, and using unstructured data will probably still be a major issue 10 years from now, although it’s possible we may have good solutions from artificial intelligence at that point. Second, I think that gathering user requirements for systems will continue to be a difficult problem, for reasons I outlined in a previous response, and may loom as a larger issue than in the past (when it was merely a very difficult and vexing problem). Third, there will be good and bad results from artificial intelligence programs building systems. Such programs will likely gather requirements (or infer them from user behavior) and design and implement the systems. As with nearly all applications of AI, systems overall should be better than if designed by humans but there will also be glaring errors (e.g., see Paul Meehl’s “broken leg” problem). As a decision theorist, my inclination is to follow Hillel Einhorn’s advice and accept error to make less error, but others will certainly differ. How do we manage systems development in the age of artificial intelligence?
Meehl, P.E. “When Shall We Use Our Heads Instead of the Formula?” Journal of Counseling Psychology, 4, 1957, pp. 268–273. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047554. Also available here.
Dawes, R.M., Faust, D., and Meehl, P.E. “Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgment.” Science, 243, 1989, pp. 1668-1674. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.2648573.Also available here.
Einhorn, H.J. “Accepting Error to Make Less Error.” Journal of Personality Assessment, 50(3), 1986, pp. 387-395. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa5003_8.
Thank you, Glenn!
Once again, we would like to congratulate Dr. Glenn Browne on receiving the 2021 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, Glenn!
