Telephone interviews were conducted with 17 leaders in the IS academic field. The leaders shared their views on the current status of the IS field in terms of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the discipline. The insights of the leaders are organized into 10 categories, including the core identity of IS, the legitimacy of the IS field, competitors to what we teach and research, research rigor versus relevance, the pervasiveness of information technology, the impacts of changing technology, the quantity and quality of journals, the demand for IS services, and ICIS and AIS. In many areas the leaders agree on the issues. Most of the differences of opinion are research related, such as the core identity of the field for research purposes, how to best achieve relevance in our research, and the number of journals in our field.
This paper describes the development of a lab to provide students with an opportunity to gain hands-on experience constructing and managing a data center. The primary use is by IT majors in a capstone project course who are divided into teams and responsible for different technologies and applications which have to be integrated and ultimately work together. The current state of the lab is described in detail along with an explanation of how it was built over the past two years, including lessons learned. Examples of projects are described. Plans for growth of the lab are described along with realized benefits in the areas of teaching, research and service.
Data centers provide highly-scalable and reliable computing for enterprise services such as web hosting, email, applications, and file storage. Because they integrate a range of different systems, data center administration is a complex process. Managing the risk of IT disaster is especially difficult. Layers of interrelated infrastructure multiply the effect of system malfunctions. Seemingly-small problems can turn into major disasters and take entire data centers offline. To cope with the myriad risks, this research develops a matrix of IT disaster prevention and mitigation techniques for data centers. The matrix is organized along two dimensions: attributes of data center infrastructure and elements of the IT disaster recovery process. It includes 134 specific techniques which were clustered into 49 cells within the matrix. An expert panel assessed the validity of the matrix and ranked the techniques within each cell. The result is a comprehensive tool for improving the resilience of data centers.
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