Dr. Barbara Wixom is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia’s (UVA) McIntire School of Commerce and an associated faculty member of MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research. She teaches courses in data management and business intelligence at the undergraduate, graduate and executive education levels. Barb is a two-time recipient of the UVA All-University Teaching Award (2002, 2010), which recognizes professors’ teaching excellence and particularly those professors who inspire and motivate students. This honor is especially meaningful to Barb because she earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia.
Barb’s has explored data warehousing and business intelligence since the mid-90’s when she began her doctoral dissertation at the University of Georgia and investigated the factors for data warehousing success. Since then, Barb’s research has focused on BI success and the business value that business intelligence can deliver to organizations. Her research ranges from large-scale surveys of BI users to in-depth case studies of BI best practices, and four of her cases have placed in the SIM Paper Awards competition: First American Corporation (1999), Owens and Minor (2000), Continental Airlines (2004), and Sprint (2008). Barb is a leading BI scholar, publishing in such journals as Information Systems Research; MIS Quarterly; MIS Quarterly Executive; and Journal of MIS, and she has presented her work at national and international conferences.
Barb maintains close ties with the practice of BI. She serves as associate editor of the Business Intelligence Journal, research fellow of The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), best practice judge for the TDWI annual BI Best Practices Awards, and executive director of the Teradata University Network. The latter initiative is a consortium of major BI vendors, such as Teradata, SAS, MicroStrategy, Tableau, KXEN and of companies, such as Wal-Mart, Dillard’s and Tyson Foods that provide free, Web-based BI software and data sets to more than 17,000 students and 2,650 faculty at 1,450 universities in 88 countries. She co-chaired the 2011 BI Congress in St Louis where 150 business and academic thought leaders met to discuss how universities can best prepare the next generation BI workforce, and she is co-chair of the upcoming BI Congress 3 event in Orlando in December 2012.
