Professor of MIS
C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Chair of Business Administration
Terry College of Business
University of Georgia

Dr. Hugh J. Watson is a Professor of MIS in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia and a holder of a C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Chair of Business Administration.

Dr. Watson is one of the world’s leading scholars and authorities on decision support. He is the author of 22 books and over 100 scholarly journal articles. He helped develop much of the conceptual foundation for decision support systems in the 1970’s and applied his knowledge and expertise to executive information systems in the 1980’s. Alan Paller, Editor of the EIS Conference Report, described Hugh as “the nation’s foremost EIS researcher…a walking encyclopedia of what works and what doesn’t.” Over the past ten years, Dr. Watson has specialized in data warehousing.

Dr. Watson is a multiple winner of the Society for Information Management’s Paper Competition. This is the field’s most prestigious award for applied information systems work. In 1986, he was awarded second place for the EIS at Lockheed-Georgia. In 1993 he won first place in the SIM competition for the methodology used to assess the benefits of the EIS at Conoco, and in 1999 he won the SIM competition for the customer-oriented data warehouse at the First American Corporation. In 2000, he won honorable mention for the business to business intelligent extranet at Owens&Minor.

Dr. Watson has consulted with numerous global organizations, including the World Bank, Intel, IBM, Arthur Andersen, Conoco, and Glaxo. He has also conducted hundreds of executive development programs.

Dr. Watson is a recognized leader in the academic community. He was conference chair for DSS-90, program chair for the 1995 Association for Information Systems conference, and serves on the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences executive committee. Dr. Watson was elected to the Decision Sciences Institute’s Executive Council, served on the organizing committee for the Association for Information Systems, elected as an AIS Americas Region Council Member, and was twice a candidate for AIS president.

Dr. Watson is a Fellow of The Data Warehousing Institute, the leading professional organization for data warehousing professionals. He is a regular speaker at their conferences, serves as the Senior Editor of the Business Intelligence Journal, helps run TDWI’s Best Practices and Leadership Competitions, and conducts TDWI sponsored research. Recently, he co-directed a major industry study on customer relationship management.

Dr. Watson is the Senior Director of the Teradata University Network, a free portal for faculty who teach and research data warehousing, BI/DSS, and database. A companion resource, the Teradata Student Network is used by students to learn about data warehousing, BI/DSS, and database.

Dr. Watson is the Consulting Editor for John Wiley & Sons Computing and Information Processing series. For the past 17 years, he has helped Wiley develop all of their information systems textbooks for the college and university market.