Workshop: Spreadsheets: The Dark Matter of Corporate It (half-day)
Leaders: Ray Panko and Dan Port

In response to Sarbanes-Oxley and other compliance regimes,
corporations have been looking empirically at their business
functions. What they are seeing is a very heavy use of spreadsheets
in compliance-related regimes - more than of packaged solutions and
handling the riskiest work when packaged solutions are used.
Governance of spreadsheets is negligible and a large majority of all
operational spreadsheets that are inspected have material errors. The
purpose of this all-day workshop is to bring together people working
in different areas of spreadsheet research so that they can help each
other understand the insights each area has been developing.   Topics
will include:
*  studies of spreadsheet practices and policies in organizations,
*  studies of error rates and the efficacy of various error
reduction rates,
*  alternatives to spreadsheets for modeling and logic testing,
*  spreadsheet productivity,
*  good software engineering practices,
*  spreadsheet security, and
*  corporate policy.

The morning session will have a series of papers on what different
research areas have found and what other researchers can learn from
these research areas.   The afternoon session will consist of
attempts to develop common research programs, frameworks, or other
combined outputs, based on the morning sessions and participant
interests.

Ray Panko (panko@hawaii.edu)received his PhD from Stanford and worked at SRI International as a project manager before coming to the University of Hawaii at Manoa Shidler College of Business, where is a Professor of Information Technology Management. He has been conducting research on end user computing since the 1970s and on spreadsheets since 1993. His spreadsheet research focuses are experimental error research, spreadsheet testing and inspection, and spreadsheet compliance issues, and recommended practices. His spreadsheet research website is http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/ssr

Dan Port (dport@hawaii.edu) is Assistant Professor of IT Management at UH Manoa Shidler College of Business and Visiting Associate at the Center for
Software and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern
California. His research focuses on strategic planning and assessment
of IV&V activities, strategic software engineering, empirical
software engineering, and software engineering education. Dr. Port
received a degree in mathematics from UCLA, and his PhD in Applied
Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science from MIT.