Dr. Severance received his Ph.D in Computer and Communication Sciences from The University of Michigan in 1972. He is now the Accenture Professor of Computer and Information Systems in the University of Michigan Business School, where he has served as the Chairman of the Computer and Information Systems faculty. Professor Severance received the Teacher-of-the-Year award from the MBA class in 1990 and the BBA class in 1998. Before joining the University of Michigan in 1978, Dr. Severance was an Associate Professor and Principle Investigator in the Management Information Systems Research Center at the University of Minnesota. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Operations Research at Cornell University.

Professor Severance has substantial industrial experience as a Member of Technical Staff with the Bell Telephone Laboratories, as an Information Systems Project Officer with the Army Chief of Staff at the Pentagon, and as a Senior Engineer with the General Motors Corporation. He has served on the Technology Advisory councils of Chrysler, Whirlpool and GM-SPO and is a member of the Board of Directors of Tenneco Incorporated. He currently acts as an information systems consultant to a number of large corporations.