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By David Dodson
Rick Watson is not a Southerner in the provincial sense. But at UGA he does claim to be the southernest. Not from down yonder--from Down Under.
“I’m a true Southerner,” he says, “I was even born in South Australia. G’day y’all.”
However, it’s not just the Aussie accent that people notice. It’s what he has to say about the hot topic of electronic commerce that’s provoking attention. And it’s made all the more interesting when his e-business expertise is contrasted with his outback upbringing.
From age six, Watson grew up on a farm outside the Western Australian town of Narembeen.
His parents sent him to the city of Perth for high school, and in 1965 he won a full four-year scholarship to Perth’s university, which bought him enough tuition to earn a three-year bachelor’s degree and a graduate diploma in the new field of computer programming.
He moved to Melbourne and sharpened his programming skills on the job while pursuing an M.B.A. He returned to Perth for a teaching job at the Western Australia Institute of Technology. Three years later, at age 30, he practically stumbled into a department head’s job at a competing college that wanted to start a department of information systems from scratch.
He’d already come a long way from the hard scrabble of Narembeen, but there was still more he wanted to learn--and much more of the world he wanted to see. He applied to Ph.D. programs in the United States, ending up at the University of Minnesota’s business school. After completing his doctorate, he fulfilled his Fulbright Fellowship obligations back in Australia but knew he wanted to bring his family back to the states.
“There were better opportunities to do research,” he says.
The Terry College of Business offered that opportunity, which he accepted 10 years ago.
“I was starting at the bottom again as an assistant professor,” he says. “Coming to UGA was like a second career because I had not been a researcher.”
His research started in group-support systems. That lasted until he saw the precursor to Netscape, called Mosaic, in 1994. A year later, Watson and colleague Patrick McKeown published a how-to book on using Internet browsers.
In the time since, Watson has begun pushing the idea of a research center to study leadership in the booming information-systems profession. And his research has turned toward the use of IS and the Internet for marketing and advertising--the new frontier for consumer choice.
“Technology will inexpensively deliver high-quality service to individuals on a mass-market level. Every consumer durable device will have a computer chip in it with a connection to the Internet,” Watson says. “This ubiquitous computing will mean extremely high levels of service for everyone--including services you’ve never thought of. The technology to do it is starting to fall in place.”
Before too long, it’ll even reach Narembeen.
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Business professor’s southern roots cultivated in the land ‘Down Under’