Grandon Gill is a Professor in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences department at the University of South Florida. He holds a doctorate in Management Information Systems from Harvard Business School, where he also received his M.B.A. His principal research areas are the impacts of complexity on decision-making and IS education, and he has published many articles describing how technologies and innovative pedagogies can be combined to increase the effectiveness of teaching across a broad range of IS topics. His most recent book, Informing Business: Research and Education on a Rugged Landscape, deals with how we might better align business academia with the complexity of business practice.  Currently, he is Editor-in-Chief of Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline and an Editor of the Journal of IT Education.
 
Dr. Gill, has also extensive experience in case method research, as well as in writing cases for classroom use and facilitating case discussions. His MBA and DBA are both from Harvard Business School, where the case method originated. He is also author of the book Informing with the Case Method (2011, Informing Science Press) and recently became the founding editor of Journal of Information Technology Education: Discussion Cases, a publication outlet for case studies in the MIS, IT and informing science fields.

Our decision-making and task environments are driven by three forms of complexity: complexity as we experience it internally (e.g., difficulty, uncertainty, ambiguity), complexity as it relates to our symbolic representation of tasks and plans (e.g., number of paths, program size), and complexity as a description of the decision environment and its behavior (e.g., ruggedness, turbulence). When experiencing high levels of complexity, we respond by constructing informing systems that better connect us together and offer increasingly rapid access to more information sources. In doing so, however, we inadvertently feed a cybernetic loop that leads to ever-expanding complexity (in all three forms). Left unchecked, this loop has the potential to alter both the way we think and the environments we face in ways that we may not desire.
 
Building a better mousetrap requires us to rethink both our approach to education and to designing systems. On the education side, we need to spend less time emphasizing specific content and more on building the student’s the ability to react to complexity in ways that do not rely on making the world more complicated. On the design side, systems must increasingly emphasize adaptability as opposed to efficiency.