CRITO is proud to announce that on December 15, 2008, Dr. Kenneth L. Kraemer was presented the Association for Information Systems LEO Award for Exceptional Lifetime Achievement in Information Systems at the annual International Conference on Information Studies in Paris, France.

In 1999, the LEO award was established by Council of the Association for Information Systems and the Executive Committee of the International Conference on Information Systems in order to honor prominent individuals in the Information Systems discipline. It is named after The Lyons Electronic Office, one of the world’s first commercial applications of computing. The LEO award is only given to one, if not any, scholar or practitioner, per year, who has made exceptional contributions throughout their career for the field. A LEO award recipient is an individual highly esteemed for their professional and personal integrity, representative of their national or regional Information Systems community, and is a role model and inspiration to fellow colleagues and students. A LEO award honoree not only excels in their field of study, but can also command attention from contributions made in fields other than Information Systems.

As this year’s award recipient, Ken Kraemer is truly an outstanding individual in the area of Information Systems and has made significant global contributions to the field over the past 40 years. He has been on faculty of The Paul Merage School of Business and The Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science at UCI. He held the Taco Bell chair in IT for Management at UCI and the Shaw Chair in Information Systems at the National University of Singapore (1990-91). He was the founding Director of the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO), the CRITO Consortium--an NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center at UCI, and the Personal Computing Industry Center (PCIC)--a Sloan Foundation Industry Center for study of the personal computing industry and technical innovation.

Dr. Kraemer is internationally known as one of the principal founders and intellectual architects of the “Irvine School” of social analysis of information technology (IT). In 1974, as Director of the Public Policy Research Organization, he and his colleagues at UCI initiated a program of research into the social, political, economic, and policy impacts of IT that has become a model for research into the societal implications of information and communications technologies worldwide. It is recognized in scholarly and practitioner communities for its critical stance towards computerization, its use of multiple theoretical perspectives, its naturalistic research strategy, and its emphasis on history and change over time in the study of IT. Beginning in the 1970’s, Dr. Kraemer's was among the first to give attention to the political character of information systems in organizations and the political uses of computer models in policy making in studies of federal and local governments in the U.S. and internationally. In the 1980s and 1990’s he examined the effects of national policies on computer production and use in the U.S., and later in Asia-Pacific and Latin American countries in efforts to understand the keys to national competitiveness in the information technology industry. He also examined both the determinants of IT investments and the contributions of IT investments to national productivity and economic growth in developed and developing countries worldwide. He completed a ten-country study of e-commerce diffusion in 2006. His current research is focused on the globalization of knowledge work in the electronics industry and on which companies and countries capture the profits, jobs and wages from innovations such as iPods or notebook computers in global value chains.

In addition, Dr. Kraemer has received 15 important honors and awards, including being elected Fellow of AIS in 2003. He has published 23 books and has published over 175 articles in leading journals of information systems and public policy. Currently, his citation count of 3,580 places him among the very top academics in management.

Ken Kraemer received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1959, reached the rank of Captain in the U.S. Air Force, and attended the University of Southern California as a Lasker Fellow receiving a masters degree in City and Regional Planning (1964) and as an NDEA Fellow receiving masters (1965) and Ph.D. degrees in public policy and management (1967).

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Kraemer on this distinguished award.