election and a poor showing of the SDP BiH, he resigned as president of the party. Lagumdžija is a member of the Club of Madrid, an independent non-profit organization created to promote democracy and change in the international community. Education Lagumdžija earned his high school diploma as a part of the Youth For Understanding exchange student program in Allen Park, Michigan in 1973. His subsequent education was at the University of Sarajevo, where he earned a B.Sc in 1977, an M.Sc in 1981 and a PhD in 1988 in the field of Computer science and Electrical engineering. In 1989, as a Fulbright Program participant, Lagumdžija did postdoctoral research at the University of Arizona in the Department of Management Information Systems and the Center for the Management of Information. Academic career Lagumdžija began teaching at the University of Sarajevo in 1989 as a professor of management information system and informatics at the Economics Faculty and Projected Information Systems and Group Support Systems at the Electrical Engineering Faculty. He served as the chair of the department of Management and Information Systems at the Economics Faculty since 1994 and the director of the director of the Management and Information Technologies Center (an organizational unit of the Economics Faculty) since 1995. Lagumdžija's particular academic interests lie in the areas of Group Support Systems and management information systems. He is the author of six books and over a hundred papers in the field of management information systems. At the end of the Bosnian War, Lagumdžija helped to secure funds from the Soros Foundation with which to rebuild the Group Support System facility at the University of Sarajevo. The strategic objective of the Management and Information Technologies Center, which housed the GSS facility, was to "assist and promote the transition of Bosnia and Herzegovina to a democratic, market-driven economy." As part of that mandate, the Center held sessions for key business and government leaders as well as students at the University of Sarajevo utilizing GSS technology to assist them in thinking about and planning for the economic reconstruction of Sarajevo. Political career Wartime political career Lagumdžija began his political career during the Bosnian War as deputy prime minister, advising then-president Alija Izetbegović. In one particular case he advised him not to sign the Vance–Owen Peace Plan: "Mr Izetbegović was not endorsing it, but thinking out loud and saying perhaps the plan would not be so bad,