Professor Ephraim McLean – “Eph” – has worked in the computer field for 45 years and been a faculty member for 39 years. He earned his Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering and Master of Engineering degrees from Cornell University in 1958. After brief service in the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, he worked for the Procter & Gamble Co. for seven years, first in manufacturing management and later as a computer systems analyst. In 1965, he left P. & G. and entered the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), earning his master's degree in 1967 and his doctorate in 1970.
While at M.I.T., he began an interest in the application of computer technology to medicine, working on his dissertation at the Lahey Clinic in Boston. While there, he was instrumental in developing the Lahey Clinic Automated Medical History System. During the same period, he served as an instructor at M.I.T. and also assisted in the preparation of the books The Impact of Computers on Management (MIT Press, 1967), The Impact of Computers on Collective Bargaining (MIT Press, 1969), and Computers in Knowledge-Based Fields (MIT Press, 1970).
Professor McLean left M.I.T. and joined the faculty of the Anderson Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the winter of 1970. He was the founding Director of the Information Systems Research Program and the first Chairman of the Information Systems area, both within the Anderson Graduate School of Management. In the fall of 1987, he was named to the George E. Smith Eminent Scholar's Chair in the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. Since joining GSU, he has helped the Computer Information Systems Department in the College improve its U.S. News & World Report's rankings to first in the southeast and top ten in the nation. In 2002, he was named Regents' Professor in the University System of Georgia, representing less than one percent of the faculty in the System. In 2007, he was appointed Chairman of the CIS Department. He has been a visiting professor at the University of South Australia; the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University in The Netherlands; ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain; and the Alexandria Institute of Technology in Alexandria, Egypt.
Dr. McLean has published over 125 articles in such publications as the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, Communications of the ACM, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Management Science, Journal of MIS, Information & Management, Journal of Risk and Insurance, DATA BASE, InformationWEEK, DATAMATION, ComputerWorld, Journal of the American Hospital Association, and the Proceedings of AMCIS, ECIS, HICSS, and ICIS. He is the co-author (with John Soden of McKinsey & Co.) of Strategic Planning for MIS (Wiley Interscience, 1977), co-editor of a book of programs entitled APL Applications in Management (UCLA, 1981), co-editor of The Management of Information Systems (Dryden Press, 2nd ed., 1994), and co-author of the textbook Information Technology for Management (Wiley, 6th ed., 2007), for years the second largest selling information systems textbook in the world. He was a founding Associate Editor for Research of the MIS Quarterly and, for seven years, the Senior Co-editor of The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems
He has three times served on the national Executive Council of the Society for Information Management (SIM); was the founding Chairman of the Southern California SIM Chapter; helped found the Atlanta SIM Chapter in 1996; and was Program Chair for the national SIM conference in Los Angeles in 1977 and again in Atlanta in 1999. In 1980, he hosted and co-chaired the Organizing Committee for the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) and was Conference Co-Chairman in 1981 in Cambridge, MA; Conference Chairman in 1986 in San Diego, CA; and Conference Co-Chairman in 1997 in Atlanta, GA. For 11 years he was the Executive Director of ICIS and of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) of which he was one of the founding members. In 1999, he was recognized as one of the first Fellows of AIS; and, in 2007, he was chosen for the LEO Award, the highest honor in the information systems field.
In addition to this university work, he has served as a consultant to such firms as the IBM Corporation, General Electric Company, Atlantic Richfield Company, Digital Equipment Corporation, BellSouth Corporation, the National Science Foundation, American Hospital Supply Corporation, McCormick & Company, Security Pacific National Bank, Pennsylvania Financial Corporation (now Primerica), and Citibank. He has also made executive presentations and conducted management workshops in Asia, Australia, Europe, South Africa, and throughout North America. In 1979 he established the week-long executive program "Managing the Information Resource" at UCLA, now in its 28th year. He is listed in the current issues of Marquis's Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World. In 2003 he was recognized as the "Information Systems Educator of the Year" by the Special Interest Group on Education of the Association of Information Technology Professionals (formerly DPMA); and, in 2007, was named as an ACM Distinguished Lecturer. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Atlanta M.I.T. Entertprise Forum, the Board of Directors of the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, the Clan Maclean Heritage Trust, and the Past President of the St. Andrews Society of Atlanta.
Course Outlines
Presentations for CIS 8100/4620
Other Presentations
Robinson College of Business | Department Computer Information System