8:46 a.m., Jan. 23, 2009----Cihan Cobanoglu, associate professor of hotel, restaurant and institutional management at the University of Delaware, has won two awards from the Decision Sciences Institute Annual Conference held in November.

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Cobanoglu was the lead author of a paper on “The effect of information technology steering committees on perceived IT management sophistication in hotels,” which won the Best Application Paper Award. This award was given to four out of the 1,100 papers that were submitted to the conference.

The paper was also selected for the Hospitality Track Best Paper Award, which had about 30 entries.

The Decision Sciences Institute is an international multidisciplinary organization dedicated to advancing knowledge and improving instruction in business and related disciplines.

Cobanoglu said this was the first time he submitted a paper to a general business conference, so he was not sure what to expect after submitting his paper. He said he was inspired to submit his work to a multidisciplinary conference after the Department of Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management became a part of the Lerner College of Business and Economics last year.

“This was very surprising to me,” Cobanoglu said of the award announcement. “It made us very happy and proud.”

The paper, which he wrote with Baker Ayoun from Auburn University and Daniel Connolly from the University of Denver and a frequent guest speaker at the University of Delaware, dealt with the impact of information technology steering committees on information technology management sophistication.

Cobanoglu said information technology steering committees exist to help advise hotel general managers and top-level executives about technology for the business. The committee can be comprised of, but are not limited to, top executives, chief information officers, IT officers, front office managers, restaurant managers, or even wait staff.

Cobanoglu said he was motivated to write the paper because he wanted to show how information technology steering committees were beneficial to hotels, but he had no empirical evidence.

The group studied the effectiveness and impact of the committees, in terms of technology and business strategy alignment, in small, medium, and large hotel organizations.

Cobanoglu said the committees could help make better technology decisions than one or two people on the top level who may or may not see operational activity because the committee represents multiple peoples' views from diverse positions.

The paper revealed that information technology steering committees are of strategic importance to the overall success of the hotel business in achieving not only its IT strategic objectives, but also in gaining an edge over its business counterparts in terms of the potential to maximize return on the investment from technology.

“The business drives the technology, not the technology drives the business,” Cobanoglu said.

Bob Nelson, chairperson of the Department of Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management, said he was delighted to find out about the awards because of the significance of the multidisciplinary conference.

“It makes a statement to the importance of the work,” Nelson said, adding it “is a great tribute” to the work being done by Cobanoglu.

Nelson said the awards show that the department is turning quality research, which is an important part of the University's Path to Prominence^TM.

Cobanoglu joined the University of Delaware in the fall of 2001. He was promoted to associate professor in 2007, and currently manages the award-winning experimental guestroom (X-Room) at the Courtyard Newark-University of Delaware hotel on campus. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology.

Article by Jon Bleiweis