Recently, New York Time had an article on evasive nature of value of IT investments in classroom. Kyrene School District in Arizona spent roughly $33 million since 2005 on various forms of information technology in classroom. Yet, the reports says, scores in reading and math have stagnated in the district, while the statewide scores have risen. The articles goes on to offer several different perspectives as to why it might have happened. One perspective says that technology spending for education is waste. Another perspective says that we have wrong measures. The third perspective is that we need to change other things to see the impact of IT spending.

This feels almost like deja vu. This is exactly the question that the entire MIS community has been trying to answer in the business context. It was called IT productivity paradox. There were people who believed that it was a matter of better technology. They believed that if we designed the system better, we would see the impact. Then, there were people who believed that it was a matter of user acceptance. They believed that individual users needed to be convinced about the usefulness of the tool so that they would accept the tool. Other believed that we needed to implement it better. They believed that if we had more user engagement, top management support and better training, we would see the value from IT investment. Out of this, we had so-called “change management” consulting practice. Then, there were people who believed that it was about changing the organizational routines and organizational structures. They believed that we needed to mangers need to pay closer attentions to existing norms and rules as they tried to bring technology into the organizations. Finally, there were people who believed that the measurement was the problem. In other words, they felt that simply if we could measure the outcome better, we would see the improvements in business performance through IT investment. All of these provided very rich understanding of how IT may or may not help organizations improve their performance.

Perhaps, people who are trying to solve this paradox can read this very rich body of research before they start spending their time and efforts to understand what is going on here. I am pretty sure we can learn a lot from just reading them.

Yesterday, on my Facebook I posted a quote from a recent article by Lamar Alexander published on Newsweek. Among other things, he points out that tenure system in American universities is not working. Here’s what he wrote:

Within academic departments, tenure, combined with age-discrimination laws, make faculty turnover—critical for a university to remain current in changing times—difficult. Instead of protecting speech and encouraging diversity and innovative thinking, the tenure system often stifles them: aspiring professors must win the approval of established colleagues for tenure, encouraging likemindedness and sometimes inhibiting the free flow of ideas.

To this post, my former colleague at Case, Susan Helper whom I respect a lot, posted the following comments:

tenure may discourage some small innovations, but also protects the development of big, unpopular ideas (imho!). As Dick Boland has said, every academic should, at least once in their career, do something they would have not been able to do without tenure!

To this I responded:

I totally agree with Dick. The challenge is that human mind is habitual. It is very hard to break away from the pattern of behavior that you acquired while you are working very hard to get tenured.

Continue reading “Tenure is not the problem.” →

Today, I explored what it means to be a management scholar with my doctoral students. One of the questions I asked them is why do we see this quandary of being in two different worlds: practice and academia. Several theories were suggested as to why we have it. And few suggestions were offered as to what to do about it. Of course, this is a quandary that will not go away as by definition, we (management scholars) are caught in between these two worlds. In a way this is precisely where we need to be. Sometimes, we put a convenient blind so that we can focus on one while ignoring the other. Sometimes, we tend to do better in one than the other. Therefore, no answer will be satisfying and that is good. We don’t want to exactly figure out his problem: the moment we think we figure it out, we will be stuck in that moment, while the world around us is moving on.