David Avison

Biography

 David Avison is Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at ESSEC Business School, near Paris, France. He joined ESSEC in 2000 after being Professor at the School of Management at Southampton University for nine years. He has also held posts at Brunel and Aston Universities in England, and the University of Technology Sydney and University of New South Wales in Australia, and elsewhere. He was President of the Association of Information Systems (AIS) for 2008-9. He was founding editor of Blackwell Science's Information Systems Journal, rated as a 'core' international research journal in information systems. So far, twenty-five books are to his credit including the fourth edition of the well-used text Information Systems Development: Methodologies, Techniques and Tools (jointly authored with Guy Fitzgerald) and most reently Information Systems Project Management (with G. Torkzedah) Sage.  He has published a large number of research papers in learned journals, edited texts and conference papers. He was Chair of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) 8.2 group on the impact of IS/IT on organisations and society and was also vice chair of IFIP technical committee 8. He was past President of the UK Academy for Information Systems and also chair of the UK Heads and Professors of IS and is presently member of the IS Senior Scholars Forum. He was joint programme chair of the International Conference in Information Systems (ICIS) in Las Vegas, joint programme chair of IFIP TC8 conference at Santiago Chile and again in Milan, Italy, programme chair of the IFIPWG8.2 conference in Amsterdam, panels chair for the European Conference in Information Systems at Copenhagen and publicity chair for the entity-relationship conference in Paris and chair of several other UK and European conferences. He also acts as consultant and has most recently worked with a leading manufacturer developing their IT/IS strategy. He researches in the area of information systems development and more generally on information systems in their natural organizational setting, in particular using action research, though he has also used a number of other qualitative research approaches.

Research Interest

 Areas Information systems development,  Information systems evaluation, Information systems strategy,  Information systems in their organizational context,  Qualitative research,  Action research, and the  Discipline of information systems.