Six months ago I got an email from Stan Birkin who is Chairman & Professor of the Information Systems/Decision Sciences Department of the College of Business Administration at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Stan was thesis advisor to me when I was working on a masters degree in 1971. He was a professor in management science at the time and I was on a military leave from IBM and stationed at MacDill Air Force base. The purpose of the email was to ask if I would be willing to go to Tampa to speak at the AMCIS 2003 Conference. The Association for Information Systems (AIS) is a worldwide professional organization of scholars and practitioners of Information Systems. The conference had an impressive 46 mini-tracks covering a wide array of information systems topics. My opening keynote was titled "The Future Of The Internet". It was not too hard to convince me to visit Tampa since I have some roots there. It was home for nearly two and a half years and it was a great pleasure to re-visit some special places.
It all started in 1970 when I was drafted into the U.S. Army and was stationed at MacDill Air Force base in Tampa, Florida. MacDill was the home of the U.S. Strike Command. STRIKE stood for "swift retaliation in any known environment" and it focused on preparedness for activity in the Middle East. The Strike Command was redesignated U.S. Readiness Command in 1972. My wife and I lived in an apartment about ten miles from the base. When she got a job as a nurse in the intensive care unit of the Tampa General Hospital we decided we needed a second car. This was not an affordable alternative at the time and so I had the brainstorm one day that a motorcycle would be a good idea. Warm climate, friendly terrain, economical transportation, etc. Why not? So, I bought a Honda 90cc motorcycle. It was perfect. Or so I thought. Then I enrolled as a graduate student at the University of South Florida. The campus was 25 miles from the apartment via Interstate 75. If you ever rode a 90cc motorcycle on an Interstate highway being sucked along by passing tractor trailers you’ll know why I then upgraded to a Honda 160cc. It was bright orange and I loved it. By the time we moved back North from Tampa I had put over 16,000 miles of motorcycling under my belt.
The University of South Florida was just establishing a graduate program in the College of Business Administration. It was just what I was looking for. The Master of Science program was similar to an MBA but a bit more technical in the curricula. I really enjoyed the management science classes in operations research, simulation, and related areas. My thesis focused on optimizing cash flow at the City of Tampa using a simulation model. Some members of the thesis committee were skeptical about using simulation to model cash flow (rather than traffic queues and the like) but Stan Birkin saw the potential and supported my work. I completed the M. S. in 1971.
Bern’s Steak House was a remarkable place in 1971 and I was delighted to see that it was as great as ever. The waiters train for one year and they have extensive knowledge of every aspect of the food and wine. On a kitchen tour after dinner you can see the 2500-pound live fish container and the cress seeds from England that sprout in the kitchen and before going into salads. Bern’s organically grows many of their vegetables on their own farm. There are many special touches. They peel your tomato before serving it. The aged steaks are incredibly delicious. There are more than sixty choices of styles and cuts and each is cut, trimmed and weighed after you order it. After the steak is removed from the hardwood grill, they swipe some garlic butter over it. The list of special touches goes on and on. You have to see it to believe it.
The wine list includes more than 6,900 unique labels. Bern’s is custodian to roughly 600,000 bottles of wine, all under temperature and humidity control. The wine cellar is the largest in the world with 90,000 bottles on hand. I could not resist the wine cellar tour but it was easy to resist the temptation to buy a glass of 1785 grand fine champagne for $6,100.
The Columbia Restaurant occupies an entire block in Ybor City – a national historic district in Tampa. The Hernandez Gonzmart family opened the restaurant in 1905 and today it is Florida’s oldest and the world’s largest Spanish restaurant. A gift shop in the corner of the building also makes hand-rolled cigars. It was a perfect spot to get out of the 90+ degree heat for a light lunch.
The AMCIS 2003 Conference attendees were treated to an evening at the Florida Aquarium. This was a nice opportunity to meet a number of the participants in the conference and also to see some incredible marine life. The most astonishing to me was the Leaf Dragon from Australia.
