Anthony Vance

I have now officially started work as a full-time employee of Brigham Young University. This week I attended the university’s annual conferences, and it has me even more excited to be here. BYU is a special place.

This fall I will research full time (no teaching), but I will participate in ISYS 571 “Academic Research in IS”, the first part of BYU’s PhD preparation program. This class, taught by Dr. Paul Lowry, is essentially a first-year PhD seminar. It’ll be fun this fall to review the fundamental concepts of science, research design, and theory building.

In preparing a manuscript for HICSS today, I googled for a HICSS EndNote style (for the bibliography) but couldn’t find one. Here is the style I created so that someone googling for this same thing can find it in the future:

HICSS EndNote style

Update: Well, that didn’t take long. Two hours later and this post is the top hit when entering “hicss endnote style” into Google. It’s amazing how encompassing Google is.

I successfully defended my dissertation for my Université Paris–Dauphine PhD. In September, I completed my PhD at GSU. I scheduled the defense to coincide wih the ICIS conference, which starts next week.

The Information Systems Department of Brigham Young University has invited me to join its faculty, and I am delighted to do so. I’ll start researching and teaching at BYU next fall.

I think highly of BYU’s ISD department, and I look forward to collaborating with them. I also look forward to working with the students of the Information Systems major and of the Marriott School generally.

I arrived in Oulu, Finland today, where I will be researching for the next three months with Mikko Siponen of the University of Oulu. I’ll be studying IT security policy compliance from the perspective of criminological theory, one of my primary research interests.

I successfully defended my PhD dissertation today, completing my PhD three years since I entered the CIS program at Georgia State University in Fall 2005. My dissertation is titled, “Trusting IT Artifacts: How Trust Affects Our Use of Technology”.

I am enjoying a book called “What They Didn’t Teach you in Graduate School”, by Paul Gray and David Drew. The book is about how to have a successful career in academia as a professor. It is written in the form of short pieces of advice that recommend or warn against something.

Paul Gray is one of the pioneers of the field of Information Systems and he has a lot of great insights and suggestions to share about academia in general. You can read an excerpt of the book here.

Here’s an excerpt on the value of reviewing:

Do, however, serve as a reviewer for journals, particularly top journals. Treat this job seriously. You will see much junk being submitted and appreciate why some journals reject 80 percent or more of their submissions. You will develop an aesthetic for what is good and what is not. You will correspond with some powerful people. When you do get a good paper to review, you will receive much earlier knowledge of an important new development. And the information gained is worth more than the time you take reviewing.