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Teaching:
A
critical determinant of effective learning is motivation.
Even the most interesting course content will not be learned effectively
if students fail to recognize its application in the real world. With
this realization, in teaching information systems and operations management
courses, I attempt to enhance the course offerings by supplementing
text and lecture materials with contemporary examples from the business
press, personal narratives from my own professional industry experience,
and stimulating hands-on practice assignments. These tidbits generally
serve as welcome intermissions in my classes and also help in cultivating
awareness and advancing intuition towards the subject of class discussions.
My
primary teaching expertise lies in Management
Information Systems (MIS), which I have been teaching
on a regular basis for the past five years. Often offered as a capstone
course, MIS is typically a core requirement in many business programs
at the undergraduate level and a popular elective at the graduate level.
By virtue of its capacity in pulling together perspectives from management
functions including marketing, finance, human resources, and operations
management, a course in MIS lends itself as a springboard to many careers.
Impressing this idea constitutes the crux of my value proposition to
my students throughout the duration of the course. I capitalize upon
different techniques in teaching MIS as an academic discipline and as
a professional practice.
In
teaching MIS as a discipline,
I frequently draw upon my own academic background in software engineering
and e-Business. With a B.Sc. in Computer Science and an M.B.A. in e-Business,
I believe that I am able to provide a creative synthesis of technology
and business viewpoints to enable a more comprehensive understanding
of the use of information systems in organizational contexts such as
customer relationship management, supply chain management, and knowledge
management. Such a big picture approach works well in the discussion
of infrastructure related topics such as databases, security technologies,
and enterprise resource planning systems.
Similarly,
in teaching MIS as a practice,
I try to relate my own industry experiences in management consulting
and project management while discussing the strategic implementation
and resource economics of information systems projects. Using this technique,
I have been successful in constructively engaging students in class
discussions with their own work related insights.
The
other course that I have been teaching over the past few years is Operations
Management (OM). I was originally approached to
teach the course on a temporary basis to fill in for someone else for
one term. However, having enjoyed my first OM teaching experience and
after receiving excellent teaching evaluations and commendations from
the Dean in the very first undertaking, the rest as they say is history.
Over the past four years, I have taught at least one OM related course
every term, and have consistently received reputable teaching evaluations
from my students.
In
teaching Operations Management, I have been able to edify my skills
through the knowledge that I acquired during my M.B.A. and my Ph.D.
coursework. For my Ph.D., I pursued a minor in Management Sciences and
successfully completed courses in Manufacturing Design, Production Planning,
and Business Decision Modelling & Simulation. I have been able to
utilize various aspects from these courses in my teaching. Additionally,
I continually draw upon my three years of experience in management consulting
where I was involved in product development and operational deployment
initiatives in various multinational organizations.
Overall,
I believe that a teacher’s enthusiasm for a subject is contagious,
and get delighted when it passes on in the classroom and one-on-one
conversations with students and colleagues. From the student reactions
in my MIS and OM courses, I believe that I have managed to pass to many
of them my enthusiasm for the topics in those courses. It has been an
extremely gratifying experience to see several students take my advanced
courses after having completed the introductory ones, and some have
even completed directed studies projects under my supervision. Similarly,
many students have commented about “my
love for what I teach” by noticing my portfolio of
industry endorsed certifications and some have approached me for help
in pursuing some of these supplementary qualifications after completing
their studies.
In
conclusion, I firmly believe that collating my academic qualifications,
professional experience, and industry endorsed certifications has worked
well in conveying theoretical concepts based on acquired knowledge,
and practical insights based on work related observations to my students.
Furthermore, the use of hands-on exercises with various tools and techniques,
along with field studies and real-world research projects have facilitated
my pedagogy by enabling me to infuse abstract conceptualizations and
deductive reasoning in my courses. Collectively, these methods have
resulted in rich course configurations that can cater to different learning
styles within experiential learning models (Kolb & Fry, 1975).
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Research:
My
core research interests lie at the intersection of community
informatics and knowledge
management. By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective
grounded within the milieu of socio-technical
research, my research philosophy revolves around the belief
that information systems need to be explored within the context of their
use. Towards this end, there are several recurring themes that can be
found in my research:
Firstly,
most of my research investigations are predicated upon social
psychology theories such as the social
cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986; 2001), the theory
of planned behaviour (Ajzen, 1985; 1991), and activity
theory (Engeström, 1987, 1999; Engeström et al.,
1998) to provide a theoretically grounded basis for my research findings.
Secondly,
as an exponent of a systems based approach
towards research investigations, I often engage in studies that employ
and yield process models for describing
the key concepts in the use of information systems. Consequently, the
models emerging from my studies are often descriptive, large-grained,
and flexible, and this allows the findings to be generalized to inform
research and practice in various contexts.
Thirdly,
I am an advocate for mixed methods research design.
As expounded by Kaplan & Duchon (1988): “No one approach
to information systems research can provide the richness that information
systems, as a discipline, needs for further advancement”.
Congruent with this philosophy, I strive to conduct empirical research
investigations using both quantitative and qualitative methods. My recent
projects have comprised exploratory as well as confirmatory research
designs with ideas adapted from grounded theory,
social network analysis, and
structural equation modeling.
Finally,
by and large, my research publications tend to be co-authored. I am
a strong proponent of collaborative research. Modern day information
system use contexts are fairly complicated in that it is virtually impossible
for one person to have all the answers to every problem encountered.
As such, I tend to work with other researchers with slightly different
skills and backgrounds with the objectives of:
i) tackling formidable and interesting IS research problems; and
ii) producing richer findings with strong contributions through the
integration of co-author knowledge and opinions.
In
terms of my future research plans, I intend to continue to focus on
research in information systems at the strategic level. I plan to continue
my work in the area of socio-technical research by examining the effective
use of information systems in various organizational contexts, especially
along the dimensions of technology acceptance and change management.
Immediately following the completion of my Ph.D., my goal is to accelerate
my research activities with the publication of top-tiered research papers,
collaborate with colleagues on empirical research, and become heavily
involved with graduate students in training assignments and research
projects.
Research Analyst 
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