Steven Alter is Professor of Information Systems at the University of San Francisco. He holds a B.S. in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Management Science, both from MIT. While on the faculty of the University of Southern California, he revised his Ph.D. thesis and published it as Decision Support Systems: Current Practice and Continuing Challenges, one of the first books on this type of information system. Professor Alter's journal articles have appeared in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, MIS Quarterly, Communications of the ACM, Communications of AIS, TIMS Studies in Management Sciences, Interfaces, Data Processing, Futures, and The Futurist.