Raoul Freeman: Professor Re-elected to Chair L.A. County Information Systems Commission

Raoul Freeman, professor and chair, Information Systems, has been re-elected as chairman of the Information Systems Commission of Los Angeles county. The commission provides counsel to the County's information technology activities, which have an annual budget in excess of $700 million. Freeman is the only academic professional who serves on the commission, and has been elected chairman for 11 consecutive years.

“The fact that a CSUDH professor holds a position of the stature of chair of the Information Systems Commission of Los Angeles County has not only served to raise the image of the university in the Greater Los Angeles community, but has also served to raise the image of the University in the eyes of our own Information Systems students,” he says. “It provides them confidence that they are being taught by faculty that are recognized both in the academic and real worlds.”

Over the years as ISC chair, Freeman has been responsible for getting a chief information function established, overseeing large scale system development projects, encouraging the development of electronically provided government services; encouraging the consolidation of data centers; reviewing the planning of a new telecommunications network; and offering counsel on the county's enterprise resource planning efforts. The recent agenda of the commission includes E-Government Services; Enterprise Resource Reporting Systems (Peoplesoft) and Los Angeles Eligibility Automated Determination; Evaluation and Reporting System (LEADER), which is a 10,000 work station welfare system. Freeman describes the impact that his experiences working with the ISC have on his teaching.

“This work allows me to discuss real-world problems of magnitude in the classroom,” he says.  “I have been able to show how some of the concepts that I teach in my Systems Development course are used in multi-million dollar projects. Furthermore, I have made the students aware of how other factors impinge upon theoretical solutions and how these sometimes need to be tailored in order to be implemented successfully.”

-Joanie Harmon