Processes, Systems, and Information: An Introduction to MIS

Earl McKinney, Jr.

Teaching the introduction to MIS course has been Earl McKinney’s passion for 20 years. He first caught the bug at his alma mater, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and has continued his addiction during his tenure at Bowling Green State University. While teaching that class and other undergraduate and graduate classes, Earl has also introduced a half dozen new courses on security, social media, ERP, and information. He has been awarded a number of department and college teaching awards by students and fellow faculty, and is currently the Chair of the Accounting and MIS departments. His interest in the broader context of the business curriculum is reflected in several of his publications and by the Decision Science Institute’s National Instructional Innovation Award.

Earl’s research in e-commerce, small team communication during a crisis, and theoretical work on the notion of information has been published in Behaviour and Information Technology, Human Factors, Information and Management, and MIS Quarterly. He consults with James Hall, the former head of the NTSB for British Petroleum, the U.S. Forest Service, and several Air Force agencies on human factors and aviation communication issues.

He holds an undergraduate economics degree from the Air Force Academy, a Master’s of Engineering from Cornell University, and a PhD in MIS from the University of Texas. A former Air Force fighter pilot, Earl lives in Bowling Green with his wife and has two grown sons.

David Kroenke

David Kroenke has many years of teaching experience at Colorado State University, Seattle University, and the University of Washington. He has led dozens of seminars for college professors on the teaching of information systems and technology; in 1991, the International Association of Information Systems named him Computer Educator of the Year. In 2009, David was named Educator of the Year by the Association of Information Technology Professionals–Education Special Interest Group (AITP-EDSIG).

David worked for the U.S. Air Force and Boeing Computer Services. He was a principal in the startup of three companies. He was also vice president of product marketing and development for the Microrim Corporation and was chief of technologies for the database division of Wall Data, Inc. He is the father of the semantic object data model. David’s consulting clients have included IBM, Microsoft, and Computer Sciences Corporations, as well as numerous smaller companies. Recently, David has focused on using information systems for collaboration in education and industry.

His text Database Processing was first published in 1977 and is now in its 15th Edition. He has published many other textbooks, including Database Concepts, 6th Edition (2013), Using MIS, 7th Edition (2015), Experiencing MIS, 5th Edition (2015), MIS Essentials, 4th Edition (2015), SharePoint for Students (2012), and Office 365 in Business (2012). David lives on Whidbey Island, Washington. He has two children and three grandchildren.