Bob McQueen's Home Page

Welcome to Bob's home page. Here is a picture of Bob with some of his bovine admirers.

This page is always under development, so some sections and references have been included which are not yet complete. Please bear with me as some links may return invalid URLs.

This document contains short sections on Bob McQueen's contact information , background , personal interests , cases , graduate students , publications , and research interests .

A PDF file of his full CV can be loaded from here .

Click these hyperlinks for more information on the University of Waikato , the Waikato Management School , the Electronic Commerce degrees offered, and the Department of Management Systems . More information is also available about New Zealand

Contact Information

Email: bmcqueen@waikato.ac.nz
Postal: Department of Management Systems, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand
Telephone - Office: +64 7 838 4126 Fax +64 7 838 4270
Telephone - Home: +64 7 823 7372

Background to present

Bob is Canadian by birth (Toronto area), and New Zealander by choice. He completed a BApSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 1969, an MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1974, and a PhD (Computer Science) from the University of Waikato in 1992. He is presently the Professor of Electronic Commerce Technologies in the Department of Management Systems, University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, and has been living in New Zealand since 1988.

Previous experience with IBM in Toronto, Digital Equipment in Vancouver, and the MBA at Harvard led to the founding in 1976 of McQueen Technology, a small business in Guelph, Canada which for six years designed and installed specialised microcomputer based data acquisition systems in the packaging industry. After a stint at the University of Guelph, working on computer conferencing (the CoSy system) and the co-ordination of the financing and network infrastructure of the extension of BITNET (which eventually evolved into the Canadian Internet backbone) into 20 Canadian universities in 1984, the McQueen family visited New Zealand for a year in 1985, fell in love with it, returned briefly to Canada for 1986-87, and then emigrated to New Zealand permanently in 1988.

Bob started at the University of Waikato in 1988 in the Department of Computer Science, and was Chairman of the Department during 1989-90. In 1994, he transferred "across the road" to the Department of Management Systems, in the Waikato Management School. His teaching is in the area of electronic commerce, information systems, and information technology in organisations.

Personal Interests

Bob lives with his gorgeous wife Anita on a 35 acre farmlet at Te Miro (map) , 22 minutes from the University. On that block he raises about 30 beef cattle (supposedly for profit), which somehow justifies his acquisition of machinery, notably several tractors, a small bulldozer, a four ton digger and a dump truck! Here is a link to a small movielet of his laneway, if that strikes your interest! His three children, Kris (39), Sue (37) and Bill (35) have fled the nest, leaving him at home with Anita to mind the place and enjoy the quiet. He is the proud grandfather of seven (and counting!), including Isla, Genevieve and Zak, offspring of Kris and Rich, Lily and Liam, children of Billy and Monica, and Jayden and Annalise, children of Sue and Ewen...here are some pics. Bob enjoys the great New Zealand love of sports and outdoor activities, and plays weekly pick-up basketball and semi-regular weekend rugby, although the enthusiasm for the body bashing of rugby is waning, but not entirely gone. From 2004 - 2009, he was involved with an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find alternatives to un-necessary giant electricity pylons marching through the beautiful New Zealand countryside. He did some work a few years ago on searching his ancestral roots. More information is available on the approximately 2000 descendents of John McQueen , who emigrated to Canada in 1833 from Islay , Scotland, and other family links are available. Links with information about people with the surname McQueen, including some info about the McQueen Clan Chief, and a list of all McQueen-surnamed people in New Zealand, can be found here .

Teaching and Cases

Bob is an enthusiastic proponent of case method teaching as an effective inductive learning approach. Thirteen cases have been developed in the Information Technology Policy area under the supervision of Bob McQueen, using the Harvard Business School approach, for teaching at graduate (MBA) levels, as well as in an undergraduate consulting practice course. 

PhD Students

A brief summary of the work being undertaken by both current and past PhD students supervised by Bob McQueen follows below.

Present PhD students:

David Williams (expected completion 2011)

Effective tacit knowledge management at the supervisory level

Guss Wilkinson (expected completion 2011)

Measuring learning organisations by adapting quick-scan methodologies

Weiwei Li (expected completion 2012)

Inter-organizational integration in extended supply chains

Debashish Mandal (expected completion 2013)

The impact of social media on entrepreneurial networks

Completed PhD students:

Jihong Chen (2010)

Jihong undertook an extensive study on how knowledge transfer and knowledge building occured at a call centre in China that was supporting the US based customers of a large international IT company.

Chansit Siritanachot (2008)

Chansit (Joe) looked at interventions to assist cross-functional, multi-level teams in developing changes to an Internet banking system in a Thailand bank which was attempting to move their customers toward Internet banking. Joe is now working in Bangkok with a large international financial services firm.

Wei Hsi Hung (2005)

Frank developed a methodology to analyze corporate web sites for support of critical business activities, and how this relates to stated critical senior management activities. Frank is now an academic with Chung Cheng National University in Taiwan.

Annick Janson (2005)

Annick's PhD was on virtual communities supported by groupware, and specifically the technical and social issues involved in facilitating an innovators online network in New Zealand. She is also the lead researcher in a project which investigated the leadership pathways undertaken by 30 NZ business leaders who have commercialised technology products and services to an international level. Annick is involved with her own consulting firm which advises on sustainability issues and knowledge building and learning systems.

Brian Whitworth (1997)

Brian is presently working at Massey University in Albany, New Zealand/, with. Brian completed his PhD at the University of Waikato in 1997, and worked immediately after with Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz at the New Jersey Institure of Technology. His interest is in distributed group support systems, which present unique characteristics which differentiate them from co-located decision room type systems. Brian has written a distributed system, called Forum DGSS, which he is planning to use as the vehicle to conduct the experimental data collection for his research. He is now based at Massey University in Auckland.

Nereu Kock Jr (1997)

Nereu (Ned) investigated the use of groupware to support business process improvement. He arrived here with his family from Brazil in 1994 , and presently holds a position at SMU International in Texas. His interests are in quality management systems, particularly in the service industry, and the use of Groupware to support Process Improvement activities. Action research methods were used to conduct his research. Ned is now based at Texas A&M International University.

Annette Mills (1996)

Annette is from Jamaica, and is presently a senior lecturer at Canterbury University in New Zealand. She completed a PhD here in 1996 under a Commonwealth scholarship. Her research was on sophistication in end user computing, and the role that self-efficacy and other variables may have on that use. She has used survey research methods to collect her data. Annette is now an academic at Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Doug Troy (1995)

Doug completed his PhD in 1995, and started it during a sabbatical visit to New Zealand in 1992. He is a Professor at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, in the Systems Analysis Department. His DPhil research has focused on the examination of the software development process for industrial process control manufacturing systems using programmable logic controllers (PLCs). He designed and supervised the prototyping of a Windows based CASE tool to support the software development process at the levels of process designer and programmer for the PLC ladder code. The work has been supported by Anchor Products, a large dairy products manufacturer near to Hamilton. Doug used action research methods to examine the impact that his prototype CASE tool would have on the software development process. oug is a Professor at Miami University, Ohio, in the US.

Publications

A list of publications is available, some of which are hyperlinked to PDF versions of the papers, or early versions of the published paper where copyright is held by the journal publisher.

Research Interests

Bob's research interests are in the areas of knowledge management, electronic commerce, software acquisition, groupware, strategic information systems, and machine learning.

Knowledge management. Information Technology has an intriguing potential to support both the building of tacit knowledge in individuals, and the transformation of tacitly held knowledge into accessible explicit knowledge. Three of his current PhD students, and a number of masters and undergraduate student projects are also conducting research in the knowledge management area, in particular how tacit knowledge is built and used in business environments.

Electronic commerce is developing into a broad area of opportunity for both academic and applied research. Current projects involve evaluating the scope and importance of EC in new venture proposals, use of Web-based EC by microbusinesses, and looking at the reasons for success and failure in a set of New Zealand located case studies in various industries.

Software acquisition and tailoring (rather than internal development) is becoming the main way most large and small organisations acquire new information systems and core applications. A study on the acquisition processes for ERP systems was undertaken by graduate student Rowan Teh with four NZ case studies, and an acquisition process model developed and published. Further work on the acquisition and adoption processes for electronic commerce software systems is planned.

The groupware interest was sparked by involvement with work in the early 1980s at the University of Guelph on conferencing systems, which resulted in the development and release of the CoSy conferencing system in 1983. Over 100 licenses were eventually sold to mostly educational institutions, but Byte magazine also purchased CoSy as the basis for its BIX Byte Information exchange. Early activities in this area in New Zealand involved the use of Lotus Notes to support both outside-classroom discussion support for MIS courses, and as the technology to support electronic group communication among a number of Maori groups in the Waikato area in New Zealand. However, there are much better and easier systems available today to support computer mediated group communication. One of the products of this research has been the development of a very basic Web based discussion system called DiscussionWeb. The system was originally written in PERL, and has been used to support teaching since 1996. A re-write in Java was completed, and the revised system used since 1999. If you'd like to try it out, jump to DiscussionWeb  for a trial run. Recently interest has shifted towards the area of social media, and how it can be used by business to support and develop relationships with their customers and suppliers.

The interest in strategic information systems has flowed from the development of case study materials on a number of New Zealand organisations, which are used in senior undergraduate and executive education MBA classes on the policy issues related to the use of information technology in organisations. The interest in machine learning arose from membership on a research team based in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waikato, which is led by Geoff Holmes. The project developed a machine learning workbench, and tested the use of machine learning techniques on a number of agricultural datasets. Further information is available on the machine learning research project.
 

index.htm March 31 2011

bmcqueen@waikato.ac.nz