The University Record, September 7, 1999 By Jane R. Elgass
John L. King, professor of information and computer science and management, University of California, Irvine, has been recommended as the new dean of the School of Information.
The recommendation will be presented to the Regents at their September meeting and is effective Jan. 1, 2000. King, who also is a research scientist in the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations at Irvine, will be professor of information with tenure at the U-M.
“Prof. King’s intellectual breadth and administrative experience position him superbly to help lead the School of Information in this critical formative period. He has an unusual combination of expertise, spanning technology, organizations and libraries, that makes him perfectly suited to provide leadership in our School of Information,” said Provost Nancy Cantor in announcing the recommendation Aug. 23.
Cantor noted that “King will be able to move easily into collaborations between the School of Information, the library system, and other schools and colleges, as U-M vigorously takes on the challenges of this information age. He will play a vital role as we create innovative educational and research programs in this area.”
King, who has held a number of administrative and committee appointments at Irvine, including chair of the Department of Information and Computer Science, is conducting research on the development of high level requirements for information systems design and implementation. Drawing on engineering and the social sciences, he studies the organizational and institutional forces that shape how information technology is developed.
“No area of intellectual inquiry is of greater importance today than that involving information and associated technologies,” noted President Lee C. Bollinger. “The School of Information is, and should be, at the forefront of these discussions. Dean King will be outstanding at leading the school in these exhilarating, and to some degree, troubling times,” he said.
King holds a B.A. in philosophy and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Administration, all from the University of California, Irvine. In addition to chairing his department at Irvine, he has served as chair of the University of California Committee on the Library, and as a member of the Systemwide Library and Scholarly Advisory Committee. In 1990, he was the Marvin Bower Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Harvard Business School.
He holds membership in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Information Systems, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and Academy of Management. He was editor in chief of the INFORMS journal Information Systems Research in 1993–98, has been co-editor in chief of Information Infrastructure and Policy since 1989, and is a member of several other editorial boards, including that for the Journal of Strategic Information Technology and the ACM Computing Surveys, for which he was associate editor in 1989–97.
The University of Michigan’s School of Information was rechartered by the Regents in 1996 to address the complex challenges prompted by rapid changes in technology, as well as by changes in the way individuals pursue and use information.
In a related article, King tells about the ‘fantastic faculty’ and administrative support that drew him to Michigan. Click
