billso.com

William A. Sodeman is an associate professor of information systems in the College of Professional Studies at Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu. He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 2005.

He teaches graduate-level courses in the MSIS, MBA and Executive MBA programs, with a primary focus on the strategic management of technology, innovation and information systems.

He teaches several online courses each year. He currently uses this blog and TurnItIn.com to manage his courses, and he has also used WebCT and Moodle to manage sections.

His current research interests include social networking, stadium naming rights agreements, and socially responsible investing. His recent publications include 6 articles in the Encyclopedia of Business Ethics (Sage, 2007) and the CIW Foundations Study Guide (Sybex, 2002).

He has directed several MSIS student research projects, and has taught several research methods courses.

Dr. Sodeman has also taught Java programming courses, although he does more work with PHP these days.

Dr. Sodeman was the chair of the HPU Faculty Assembly for the 2007-08 academic year.

From 2003 to 2006, he was the program chair for Information Systems at HPU. He also directed the first two cohorts of the MSIS Professional program.

He was the secretary of the Honolulu chapter of the AITP from 2004 to 2006, and is a director of the chapter.

He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on management, business policy, business & society and international business at Marquette University (visiting assistant professor, 1993-1994) and the University of Southern Indiana (assistant professor, 1994-1997).

Education

In 1993, Dr. Sodeman received his Ph.D. in business administration from the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. His major field of study was strategic management, with a minor in management information systems. Dr. Sodeman also took courses on entrepreneurship, technology & innovation, business & society, and research methods. He was inducted into Sigma Iota Epsilon in 1990, and Blue Key in 1992.

While he was a doctoral teaching assistant, he taught over 20 undergraduate sections of business policy and principles of management. The university was on the quarter system, and doctoral students were regularly given solo teaching assignments for sections of 30 to 50 undergraduate business students.

His dissertation, Social investing: The role of corporate social performance in investment decisions, examined the decision making processes that socially responsible investment (SRI) managers use. His dissertation chair was Dr. Archie B. Carroll. The dissertation was nominated twice for the annual best dissertation award of Social Issues in Management division of the Academy of Management. Copies of the dissertation are available for purchase from UMI.

He earned his MBA and was inducted into Beta Gamma Sigma in 1988 at the Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Crummer was and remains one of the few AACSB-accredited graduate business programs in the USA that focuses exclusively on its MBA program. The Crummer School does not offer an undergraduate business degree or a doctorate.

While he was at Crummer, Dr. Sodeman served as the secretary of the MBA Student Association and hosted a weekly alternative music radio show at WPRK-FM. He also completed a student internship with the Orlando Utilities Commission, during which he wrote a software simulation for the commission’s electric generation network.

In 1986, Dr. Sodeman earned a BA degree in fine arts at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He worked in several media, including painting, intaglio, and photography. He hosted alternative and classical radio programs at WCWM-FM, where he also served as chief announcer and training director. During this time, he also assisted in planning the station’s move from Phi Beta Kappa Hall to its current location in the Student Center. He also worked as an intern at the Muscarelle Museum of Art. He was inducted into the Society of Collegiate Journalists in 1985.

Interests

Dr. Sodeman has completed 5 marathons and a 50km ultramarathon.

He lettered in track ih high school, where he ran 1 and 2 mile events.

My last name

My last name is very easy to pronounce and spell.

Here’s a handy pronunciation guide from PronounceNames.com

My university email address includes my entire last name.

There is NO “R”.

There’s only ONE “N”.

This article was first posted on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=265

I enjoyed reading this article in today’s Honolulu Advertiser. There are several examples of worst and best practices in business writing.

It’s good to see that a few leading business schools, including Notre Dame, are including writing and communication courses in their programs. Students at my university, which has a large international enrollment, would benefit from a similar program.

Tom Clark, an entrepreneurship professor at Xavier University, summed it up well:

“Young people are wrapped up in the speed with which they communicate rather than seeing writing as a reflection of their best selves.”

Clear writing is important for any business student, no matter their age. I’ve always believed that learning how to become a lifelong learner is an important part of graduate school. E-mail, blogging, and text messaging make writing well a daily challenge.

If employees don’t understand the message, what’s the point?

If supervisors and managers must struggle to understand a subordinate’s report or memo, something is wrong. Here’s an poor example from American Savings Bank. The company and its parent, HEI, are now involved in multiple investigations and two lawsuits regarding a bank officer’s misappropriation of over US$600,000 in customer funds. I doubt that senior vice president Abel Malczon, Connie Lau or Bert Cormiel ever believed that poor writing could land them in civil court.

I really enjoyed class this weekend with the MBAs! I did get a few questions about why we’re using Bloglines, and what’s it all about, anyway?

As I mentioned in class, I’d like you to try some push technologies during our course, as a means of creating your own form of personal competitive advantage in your careers and business ventures.

You’ll have a chance to evaluate these services at the end of our course, and some of you might continue using push services if they work well for you.

This article at ubergizmo.com is a nice, quick explanation of RSS or Really Simple Syndication. RSS uses the XML data standard to push information about blogs and web content to you.

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/rss.php

We’re using RSS to support our business intelligence and research projects. Bloglines combines a fine RSS reader with the Ask.com search engine, so it’s almost like one-stop shopping for your research needs.

Next week, I’ll discuss how to use EBSCO along with Bloglines.

There are many, many RSS readers that you can install on your computer. An RSS reader lets you subscribe to multiple RSS feeds from different web sites, and will pull new content into your reader whenever you run the reader program.

Some people prefer that approach, in which the RSS subscription software is installed on your own computer, or what IT professionals call the client. If you’re concerned that someone might hack into a web-based RSS reader account and read your subscriptions, and you only use one computer on a regular basis, then client-side software is a good choice.

I find this client-side approach difficult to use, as I use several different computers in different locations. So I’ve chosen Bloglines as my web-based RSS reader. Bloglines uses a server-based approach, and it is always updating my account with your blog entries and other items on my blogroll, or list of RSS subscriptions.

I’m requiring your groups to use Bloglines because it works pretty well as a groupware tool, and I can focus on your assignments instead of supporting multiple kinds of RSS readers. I’ll admit that Bloglines isn’t perfect. I find the edit window is quirky, and there’s no spell checker. You might consider editing your posts in Word before you copy-n-paste an article into the edit window.

Bloglines is not the only web-based RSS reader. There’s another one that I’ve seen but haven’t tried called Rojo.com. It uses tagging, a technique that we’ll examine with another service called social bookmarking.

If you want to set up your own server-based RSS reader, but you don’t like Bloglines, I’d suggest My Yahoo if you already use that service or Yahoo Mail, and you could try Google Reader if you are a Gmail or Google News user. There are other alternatives available, so use your favorite search engine to find them.

From CIO Insight: John Parkinson asks an important question - how well can business schools prepare their students to take leadership positions in information technology and innovation?

Graduate education emphasizes meta-learning, or the ability of learning how to learn. A successful master’s degree candidate has demonstrated that they understand and use the course material, and that they can continue to learn and grow as professionals and scholars.

The MBA degree program is fundamentally different from more specific degrees programs. I speak from experience - I earned an MBA as a full-time student at Rollins College in 1988, and I’ve been program chair of an MSIS program for the last 3 years. I also teach dozens of MBA and MSIS students every year. I have a bio page here.

MBA programs provide broad cross-training

An MBA program provides cross-training over several required topics (finance, accounting, marketing, management, law, technology, strategic management) and a handful of specific electives. However, some MBA programs have no electives at all. Other MBA programs have specific areas of interest, such as entrepreneurship, technology, or vertical markets.

A major part the MBA program’s value lies in the integration among the courses. As this is a master’s program, students must do the integrative work themselves, using the frameworks provided by their faculty. This represents the integration of functional areas into business, corporate, and enterprise strategies.

MSIS programs provide managerial and technical preparation

An MSIS program tends to focus on technical skills (telecommunications, software, hardware) and management skills (project management, knowledge management, strategic management). Again, the students follow a framework provided by the faculty as they integrate their knowledge.

If we treat IS as a functional area, and innovation as a process to be managed, the role of the IS professional is to help the organization deliver more value and effectiveness through technology and innovation.

Parkinson’s thesis - that deep scholars are difficult to find - has some merit. Many organizations select CIOs who have demonstrated management ability, but who have limited technological experience. These CIOs are expected to be “quick studies” as they master the technologies and processes that provide value in their organizations.

The MBA degree has often be derided as the “quick study” certificate. Because MBA students get only one or two classes in each of the core functional areas, they learn how to perform rapid analyses that may be sophisticated, but may also lack detail and rigor.

On the other hand, Herbert Simon pointed out that decision-making is usually constrained by the bounds of time, space, and our own cognitive abilities. Managers want to optimize, but they end up satisficing, or making do with less in oder to complete the task at hand. This Wikipedia article has more information and links about Simon’s work, and any good principles of management textbook should discuss Simon as well.

Information systems and technology allow managers to extract more precision and process more data in their everyday work. While IS professionals are essential to this task, they do not necessarily understand the strategic value of the systems they develop, implement and maintain.

In the end, MBAs depend upon IS professionals, and vice versa.

This article first appeared on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=36

 http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,70946-0.html

What happens when your new computer can’t open an file you created or bought years ago?

In IT, we call this a “legacy” issue. See chapter 9 and pages 326-7 for a brief discussion of legacy issues and end user resistance.

I’ve used several different word processors since 1981.

During the first year of my MBA program, our university’s computer lab used Samna Word. Samna was ugly, but it worked. The software had one ridiculous feature - if you swapped the floppy disk while a document was open, Samna would overwrite the new floppy disk’s directory tracks with the old disk’s directory information. This was a fast, effective way to lose every file on both floppy disks.

Between my first and second years, our computer lab switched to WordPerfect, which had a commanding market share at the time. WP couldn’t open Samna documents easily, but we kept Samna around so that users could save their old documents to the WP format. The converted documents still required some cleanup, as Samna’s conversion wasn’t word perfect enough. (rimshot)

File conversion is a common legacy issue for IT departments. If I had to convert my old MBA files today, I’d use Google to find a conversion service like this one. They’ll even process a 5.25 inch floppy disk, which is what I used as an MBA student.

In 1997, such conversion services were difficult to find at a moment’s notice. While I was packing for a cross-country relocation, I gulped down hard, said “goodbye”… and tossed all of my 5.25 inch floppies into a dumpster.

I hadn’t owned a working 5.25 inch floppy drive in years. Those floppy disks were in bad shape, and I didn’t see the point in retaining them. I still have some digital and hard copies of my MBA work, but the original disks are sitting deep inside a landfill in Indiana.

Between 1987 and 1997, I used WordPerfect. I can still open and read the files I created, including my dissertation.

In 1997, I moved from academia to the corporate world, and I switched to Microsoft Word. I’ve been using Word ever since, even though it’s a bulky troll of an application when compared to WordPerfect. Most Windows computers don’t have WordPerfect installed these days.