About the Authors

Dr. Elliot Bendoly is the Distinguished Professor in the Operations and Business Analytics department of the Fisher College of Business, at The Ohio State University.  Profession Bendoly has served as dean of the College’s top-rated undergraduate business program, and has lead the Specialized Masters in Business Analytics program. Before joining Fisher, Dr. Bendoly was the Caldwell Research Fellow and Associate Professor in Information Systems and Operations Management at the Goizueta Business School of Emory University.  His pre-academy industry experience includes work as research engineer for the Intel Corporation.  He holds a PhD from Indiana University in the fields of Operations Management and Decision Sciences, with an Information Systems specialization in ERP and Knowledge Management. More recently he has been involved with coursework on modern analytics and visualization, IT-supported service operations and DSS development for managers.  The professor serves as Senior Editor at the Production and Operations Management journal (Behavioral Operations and Management of Technology departments) and as Department Editor for the Journal of Operations Management (Technology Management). His own publications in POM and JOM, combined with his works in Management Sciences, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly and Journal of Applied Psychology, and the Journal of Business Logistics represent no less than 34 published academic articles.

He has authored no less than an additional 33 articles in outlets including the Decision Sciences, Journal of Supply Chain Management, EJOR, IJOPM and Decision Support Systems.  His current research interests are split between studies into the effectiveness of Operations/IT alignment, and investigations in the Behavioral Operations domain: collaboration/group dynamics; and work policies/task complexity/uncertainty.  Dr. Bendoly is the author of “Excel Basics to Black Belt” (Cambridge Press 2020, 2013, 2008), a book on which his Crystal Apple Award winning elective is based (www.excel-blackbelt.com).  He is also the co-editor of “Strategic ERP Extension and Use” (Stanford Press 2005) and the “Handbook of Research in Enterprise Systems” (Sage 2010), the “Handbook of Behavioral Operations Management” (Oxford 2015) and “Visual Analytics for Management” (Taylor-Francis/Routledge 2017). Coursework: www.excel-blackbelts.com; Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Bendoly 

Dr. Daniel (Dan) Bachrach is an Elected Fellow of the American Psychological Associate (APA), Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), and the Association for Psychological Science (APS). He has won multiple awards for both teaching and research, including the University of Alabama’s highest award for teaching, the National Alumni Association’s Outstanding Commitment to Teaching Award, and the Culverhouse College Board of Visitors Research Achievement Award. Dan is a Full Professor of Management, and a Morrow Faculty Excellence Fellow. He is the author, co-author or co-editor of 14 books on technology, sales, behavioral operations, and management, including two leading management textbooks, Management (15e) and Exploring Management (7e), used throughout the United States, with versions translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish used around the world. He has published more than 60 research articles, and his work regularly appears in the field’s most elite scholarly journals, including Organization Science, The Strategic Management Journal, the Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, the Journal of Management, and the Journal of Operations Management, among others.  According to Google Scholars, Dan’s work has been cited more than twenty thousand times to-date. 

Dan is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Organizational Behavior (Impact Factor 5.97), and a recognized expert in several academic areas, including Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Transactive Memory Systems in teams and leadership. Dan has received more than one-point three million dollars in extramural funding from public agencies since 2017. His academic research has been iteratively funded by independent divisions of the United States Army, including the Research Facilitation Lab and the Basic Research Division of the Army Research Institute and the National Science Foundation. Dan teaches the mass Introduction to Management sections of Organizational Theory and Behavior to face-to-face classes of 250-plus students and mass, online sections in the Culverhouse College of Business. He also teaches the first-year Leadership and Ethics course in the MBA core, as well as courses in team productivity in the Executive MBA program and Executive Management programs in the Manderson graduate school of business. 

Kathy Koontz is Analytics Platform Strategist with AWS, working to help customers create sustainable competitive advantage from their data and analytics investments. She has more than 30 years of experience working with large organizations in data and analytics across multiple industries including retail, financial services, public sector, and others. Her roles have been in both business and technology ranging from ETL developer writing SQL code, working as a marketing analyst measuring omni-channel campaign effectiveness, to leading analytic transformation programs at multiple Fortune 100 financial services companies. Additionally, she has demonstrated success in building high-performing teams, driving organizational change, improving analytics maturity, and leading customer-centric transformations. She is a regular conference speaker focusing on realizing sustainable competitive advantage from analytics and serves as an advisory board member for the Customer Analytics Program at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. When not transforming analytics organizations, Koontz enjoys spending time with her husband and two daughters in a variety of activities including road-cycling yoga, snow skiing, hiking, cooking, traveling and other adventures. She also raises money for cancer research through the Pelotonia community.

Porter Schermerhorn is a Principal Engineer, at Amazon. Porter initially joined Amazon Web Services (AWS), working to expose Amazon’s underlying e-commerce platform to third party developers. He led development of AWS ROSE (Retail Ordering Services, U.S. Patent 8,627,379), a private web-service for trusted 3P partners which also served as the control plane for Checkout-By-Amazon (CBA).  Porter next joined the Affiliate Marketing team where he helped design the Dynamic Throttling Web Service (U.S. Patent 8,281,382) and drove the re-launch of the Product Advertising API (PA-API) in the Amazon Affiliate Marketing Developer Toolkit. During his tenure in Amazon Consumer Marketing, Porter was the driving force behind many innovations, including CAFÉ (Common Automated Framework for Engagement, U.S. Patents 9,805,177 & 9,959,551).  Porter then rotated from Consumer Marketing to serve as a floating technical resource supporting the Amazon Fashion division, focusing on Amazon’s Merch on Demand business and its fashion subsidiary Shopbop. 

Most recently, Porter has taken up a new position in Amazon’s Global Media & Entertainment division, where he is chartered with defining the technical vision and strategy for entertainment centric merchandizing and shopping experiences across media properties such as MGM and Amazon Studios. Early in Porter’s Amazon experience, he found a pathway to add additional value in career mentoring and coaching, especially for early-mid career engineers.  He is a longstanding member of Amazon’s Interview Bar Raiser program and leads the Career Development content track at Amazon’s annual internal Developer Conference.  Along the way, Porter recognized the equal importance of application of EQ alongside IQ in delivering durable success for both Amazon’s customers and one’s own career.  Long a self-proclaimed student of luminaries like Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence, 1995), Porter is a strong proponent for the integrated study of human psychology and organizational behavior alongside core engineering fundamentals.  In additional to technical strategy and software development, part of Porter’s central focus at Amazon has been evangelizing how a deep understanding of one’s emotional self as well as the emotional properties of others is a defining quality in successful technical leaders. Porter is a tenured member of the Executive Mentorship Program for the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. He also serves on the advisory board for the Russ College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Ohio University.  Porter received his Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science from Earlham College.