Next stopUniversity of Dayton

The dean of UD’s business school, Sam Gould, who had joined the school in 1985, was keen on improving the stature of the school and, in particular, building a strong IS group. He agreed to my request to enhance the compensation package of incoming faculty. That helped us recruit several talented junior faculty members. The first one among them was Ritu Agarwal, who has turned out to be a highly successful scholar and served in many important roles, including that of editor-in-chief for one of our top journals, Information Systems Research.

Prabuddha DePersonally, I benefitted greatly from the research collaboration with two colleagues, Jay Ghosh and Chuck Wells. Both were bright, had strong analytical training, and were fun to work with. We started publishing at a nice pace. In fact, my own publication rate was the best while I was at UD. We published some papers in top journals, but the others in mid-level outlets mainly because of my hesitance. Often, I convinced Jay and Chuck that the paper we had just finished was not quite up to the mark for publication in a top journal, only to notice one or two years down the road a similar paper in a journal from which we had shied away.

There was one problem though. The work we were doing fell in the general area of applied operations research and operations management, not IS. I tried to justify to IS colleagues elsewhere that ours is also IS research, but most of them did not buy my arguments, for valid reasons I must admit. I was not really bothered by this as I was enjoying the work, and it was not an issue for my coauthors because they belonged to OR/OM anyway.

Something interesting happened in 1996. A survey published in Journal of Operations Management listed all three of us among the best contributors — in terms of both quality and quantity — to the research literature in production and operations management over the five-year period, 1989-1993. More importantly, it ranked UD #1 in the country in this area based on publications during this period. The survey considered publications in too many journals, and I am sure one could also find other flaws in its analysis. Nevertheless, it was an unbelievably nice recognition for a university that did not even have a PhD program in the business school.

I was always quite involved in professional activities in the IS area. I tried to stay particularly involved in such activities while at UD because I was perhaps a little concerned that I would be forgotten in the IS academic arena at large being at a university which might not be considered a “major” university by everyone. For several years, I served as an associate editor for five well-known journals at the same time  —  Management Science, Information Systems Research, Journal of MIS, Decision Sciences, and Decision Support Systems. I also served as the program chair for our main conference, ICIS, and the workshop co-chair for a major workshop, WITS, besides serving in other roles. I suppose I could work pretty hard in those days.

Beginning in about 2000, I started to think of moving to a “major” university to spend the last phase of my professional career there, if at all possible. An opportunity did arise in 2002, and I joined Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management in a newly created endowed position, leaving behind a very enjoyable 15-year tenure at UD.

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