About the Authors

Jerry Power is the executive director of the Institute for Communication Technology Management (CTM) at University of Southern California’s (USC) Marshall School of Business. CTM and its board of corporate leaders are actively engaged in identifying emerging trends driven by the rapid evolution of digital communications technologies and services. Through its research and educational programs, the institute explores the new opportunities and challenges for the business community in the age of automation, mobility, broadband, and digital content. CTM embraces the increasingly dynamic nature of the market and harnesses the thought leadership of academia to link them with issues facing government and corporate organizations. The ultimate goal of CTM is to find new ways for these organizations to thrive as they serve the emerging needs of customers and citizens in an evolving business climate. Jerry is also a founding member of the Intelligent IoT Integrator (I3) Consortium. I3 is a private-public-academic group of partnered entities working to create an open-source framework that supports a democratized (IoT) marketplace. By supporting the creation of diverse communities of independent IoT device owners, participants in the emerging data economy are able to reduce the friction associated with deploying and operating in an information-rich environment. The consortium recognizes the importance and the personalized nature of privacy, trust, and incentives as key enablers of a sustainable, managed, and networked IoT infrastructure that supports collaborative IoT environments. By removing the IoT market inhibitors, the complexities associated with value creation from IoT data streams are reduced, thereby supporting the ongoing development of the market. Prior to his time at USC, Jerry spent more than thirty years working for Alcatel-Lucent and Siemens, where he was engaged in developing and supporting products and concepts that shaped the structure and use of modern digital networking systems.

Tom Ferratt has had a distinguished career, primarily as a university professor. He has been an author, teacher, researcher, and consultant. Most of his work has focused on management information systems (MIS). The Advanced Practices Council of the Society for Information Management, a professional network for information technology (IT) leadership, has sponsored his work on developing and retaining a world-class IT staff. That work led to his first book, Coping with Labor Scarcity in Information Technology: Strategies and Practices for Effective Recruitment and Retention. Other work with chief information officers includes developing a community health information network with hospitals in the Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association to share patient information across emergency rooms. Tom’s research has been published and featured in leading publications, including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Academy of Management Journal, Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and Computerworld. He has been on the editorial boards of internationally recognized IT journals and has served in leadership roles with the Special Interest Group on Computer Personnel Research and, subsequent to its merger, the Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is currently professor emeritus at the University of Dayton, where he served as the Sherman-Standard Register Endowed Chair in MIS and as an associate dean in the School of Business Administration. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Notre Dame, and his MBA and PhD in business administration are from Ohio State University. He was a member of the faculty and a department chair at Drake University and a visiting professor at Indiana University. He and Jerry Power met while Tom was a visiting scholar at the USC in 2015. Their work together eventually led to collaborating on this book.