Dr. Welke brings to his current position as Director of the Center for Process Innovation in the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, a unique blend of real-world and international academic qualifications. As a practicing I/T professional he began his work experience at General Motors Research Laboratories in 1961, working on the first CAD/CAM system. He has owned and managed two CASE software development and consulting companies based in Canada and the U.S. and has held the position of interim CIO at both Law Group and H.J. Russell and Company, both engineering consulting firms based in Atlanta, GA.

As an academic, Dr. Welke has held professorial appointments at McMaster University in Canada, Erasmus University in the Netherlands, and Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia as well as numerous visiting appointments. At Georgia State, Dr. Welke was head of the Computer Information Systems department, and oversaw its emergence as one of the top ten academic I/S departments in the U.S. He continues as a professor in the CIS department. He has been the principle investigator or co-investigator on a number of funded research projects with a combined value of over USD three million. Dr. Welke is a founding member of ICIS, the TIMS College on Information Systems, and IFIP WG 8.2 as well as being chairperson and program chair of several ICIS and IFIP conferences. For these contributions, Dr. Welke received the IFIP Outstanding Service Award for his service to the international informatics community. He is, or has been, an associate editor of four academic journals as well as co-editor of an academic book series on I/S.

Dr. Welke co-founded the GeM (Global eManagement) executive masters degree education consortium and was its inaugural chairperson. He has had his research published in over fifty books, refereed journals and conference proceedings, including MISQ, CACM, Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, Information Technology and Management, Informatie, and Database. Dr. Welke’s research is currently focused on ICT-enabled process innovation. His perspective is drawn from the areas of meta-system specification and representation, systems modeling and transformational methodologies.