Tech-savvy Sondheimer joins Isenberg School

by Lou Wigdor, special to the Chronicle

Norman Sondheimer (Stan Sherer photo)

or citizens and businesses alike, navigating through information about government services can be frustrating and bewildering," observes Norman Sondheimer, Dean's Executive Professor at the Isenberg School of Management. During the year ahead, Sond-heimer, who joined the faculty in August, will teach courses in e-commerce and information technology (IT) in the MBA program.

      He will also head up the school's Strategic Information Technology Center and co-direct (with dean Lee Osterweil of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics) the Electronic Enterprise Institute. It is through EEI that Sondheimer, Osterweil, and Center for Public Policy Research professor Charlie Schweik are directing process modeling technology research to improve the accessibility, relevance, and overall consumer friendliness of the Commonwealth's planned Internet portal.

      "It's our contribution to Mass.Gov, the state's forthcoming customer-focused, Web portal, which is scheduled to be up and running next year," notes Sondheimer. "The plan is to transform state service processes from a reflection of the state's traditional vertical, agency-based structure to a horizontal, fully-integrated task-based information and delivery system."

      In their contributions to the state's one-stop-shopping portal, Sondheimer and his colleagues are focusing on a variety of issues, including integration of disparate data bases and systems; creation of a consistent, intuitively friendly interface; and balancing virtual services and agencies with the physical reality of state agencies and programs (Sondheimer calls it the relationship between clicks and mortar). At the same time, the researchers' work will incorporate consumer privacy and agency turf considerations.
"At EEI, we consider our work with Mass.Gov as a test case for success in all sorts of electronic enterprises," insists Sondheimer. "If the Internet can make our governments easy to deal with, it can help anywhere."

      Sondheimer pursues an equally ambitious agenda as director of the Strategic Information Technology Center (SITEC), which offers an annual program of speakers, workshops, and consulting to chief information officers and their staffs at 11 sponsor companies and nonprofit organizations in Western Massachusetts.
Sondheimer holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His B.S. degree is in mathematics and English from Carnegie-Mellon University.

      Most recently, he was director of business-to-business development at a Herndon, Va. communications start-up, InphoMatch. Before that, he led United Technologies and General Electric's information technology research laboratories, where his "inventors" created everything from jet engine used-parts marketplaces on the Internet to AI programs that pick television programs, to fuzzy logic dishwashers.

      Sondheimer has also been a deputy division and project leader at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.

      "Many at UMass may be familiar with me from my term as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics," notes Sondheimer. "I hope to add many new friends to their ranks during the coming year."