Mark Silver

Mark Silver, a professor of information systems at the Gabelli School of Business, received his BA in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD in decision sciences from the Wharton School. Before coming to Fordham, he was a faculty member at UCLA's Anderson Graduate School of Management and at New York University's Stern School of Business. Professor Silver has served as a senior research fellow at the Higher Education Finance Research Institute and as a systems analyst with International Data Base Systems, Inc.

A presenter at prestigious conferences in the United States and overseas, Professor Silver introduced the concepts of "system restrictiveness" and "decisional guidance" into the information-systems literature. His research focuses on the connection between the design features of IT artifacts and their effects and on the design features of interactive computer-based systems, especially decision-support systems and browser-based applications. In these contexts, he is especially interested in the role of restrictiveness and guidance.

Professor Silver wrote a book titled Systems that Support Decision Makers: Description and Analysis, and he developed the IT Interaction Model, an approach to teaching the MBA-level core course in information systems. One of his papers, "A Foundation for the Study of IT Effects: A New Look at DeSanctis and Poole's Concepts of Structural Features and Spirit," co-written with M. Lynne Markus, earned dual best-paper honors in 2008: one from the Senior Scholars Consortium of the International Conference on Information Systems, and the other from the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, in which it was published.

In service to his field, Professor Silver was editor of the DSS-92 Transactions, associate program chair for AMCIS 2004, track chair for ICIS 2008, associate editor of theManagement Information Systems Quarterly and a member of Organization Science'seditorial review board. In 1994, he was named reviewer of the year by Information Systems Research. He has also served on the steering committee of the Knight Higher Education Collaborative.

Education

• PhD: Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
• Bachelor's: BA, Mathematics, University of Pennsylvania

Research interests

• The design features of interactive computer-based systems and their consequences
• Information System Restrictiveness and Decisional Guidance
• The design and usability of Browser-Based Applications
• Decision Support Systems

Publications

• Silver, Mark S., "On the Design Features of Decision Support Systems: The Roles of System Restrictiveness and Decisional Guidance," in The Handbook on Decision Support Systems 2," F. Burstein and C. Holsapple (eds.), Springer-Verlag Berlin, 2008, pp. 261-291.
• Markus, M. Lynne, and Mark S. Silver, "A Foundation for the Study of IT Effects: A New Look at DeSanctis and Poole's Concepts of Structural Features and Spirit," Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), Special Issue Honoring the Scholarship of Gerry DeSanctis, 9, 3/4, 2008, pp. 609-632.
• Silver, Mark S., "Decisional Guidance: Broadening the Scope," in Human-Computer Interaction in Management Information Systems, D. Galletta and P. Zhang (eds.), part of the "Advances in Management Information Systems" series, M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY, 2006, pp. 90-119.
• Silver, Mark S., "Browser-Based Applications: Popular but Flawed," Information Systems and e-Business Management, 4, 2006, pp. 361-393.
• Silver, Mark S., M. Lynne Markus, and Cynthia M. Beath, "The Information Technology Interaction Model: A Foundation for the MBA Core Course," MIS Quarterly, 19, 3, September 1995, pp. 361-390.
• Chung, H. Michael, and Mark S. Silver, "Rule Based Expert Systems and Linear Models: An Empirical Comparison of Learning by Examples Methods," Decision Sciences, 23, 3, May-June 1992, pp. 687-707.
• Silver, Mark S., Systems That Support Decision Makers: Description and Analysis, John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, 1991.
• Silver, Mark S., "Decisional Guidance for Computer Based Decision Support," MIS Quarterly, 15, 1, March 1991, pp. 105-122.
• Silver, Mark S., "Decision Support Systems: Directed and Nondirected Change,"Information Systems Research, 1, 1, January March 1990, pp. 47-70.
• Silver, Mark S., "Descriptive Analysis for Computer Based Decision Support,"Operations Research, 36, 6, November December 1988, pp. 904-916.
• Silver, Mark S., "User Perceptions of Decision Support System Restrictiveness: An Experiment," Journal of Management Information Systems, 5, 1, Summer 1988, pp. 51-65.