Thank you very much for having me. Delighted to be able to talk to, the junior faculty and students. So, originally, I am from India. I migrated to the United States - I came as a student in 1989 for my PhD studies. Since then, after I completed my PhD '93 - and since then I've been here at Emory since '94, as a faculty member in the information systems area and started as an assistant professor here. I have been here at Emory in Atlanta since then. So, I mentioned that I came here as a student and I got my undergraduate degree in mathematics and my MBA in India. I worked for a few years in the information technology sector of India. It was just in its early days in the mid to late 80's. And I work for a technology consulting and corporate education companies. And that sort of gave me a lot of perspective of how information technology, as I saw even back then, was going to change how companies operated and change the world as we know it today. So, I think that gave me a tremendous impetus to come to the US, to pursue my studies. I came with specific ideat of learning more about information systems and not just from the computer science perspective but more in terms of its implications and how it is potentially going to impact businesses and organizations future. So, having said that I think that has always been my interest in understanding the role of technology and its implications for business or firms but more broadly for organizations of all kinds.

So, I mentioned that the after I got my PhD at Texas A&M. And then, have been here at Emory University in Atlanta. For over twenty years now, I've been a faculty member here. So, primarily Emory is been in the business school and we have many different types of programs. Largely in the BBA and BA space. We've got different kinds of MBA programs. We've got an undergraduate business degree, which is just pretty broad - all the students just sort of pick different concentrations and clearly there's increasingly growing interest in picking information systems and analytics as concentrations. So, we offer core and elective classes there, in that space. And also, most quite recently, we have started a master's in business analytics program. So, as you very well know, there's a lot of growth and impetus for training students, not just in information technologies and systems but also in the growing area of analytics and digital businesses. So, we try to cater to the demands of the market, the organizations as well as of our student interests. And we are constantly - sort of - revamping our courses. Even if it's not brought a curriculum effort individually, faculty try to bring in the latest, both from a technology perspective as well as from a business perspective, what the students need to do in our classes. So, that's broadly the set of programs we have been catering to. A lot many of our students go into - not certainly just IT companies, but a variety of industries, consulting is a very popular. The goal of the students for consulting jobs as well as in the banking and financial sectors. But regardless of the sector, the position we take is, every student no matter where they end up, which organization, they have to know how technology's going to change - the options - and how currently it can be leveraged for business operations, for strategic business perspective, success and so forth. So, we start with that framing and then see what do our students need to do. Both, IS students as well as other business students that look for these kinds of jobs.

Like I mentioned before, my research is always centered around this question of how firms - adopt, use and leverage information technologies and systems for growth and for profitability for business operations and so on. So, that's the broad question and within that there's several things that I've studied in depth. Because first of all, I think I started my research at the time when there was sort of all these huge investment going into information technologies. The firms were spending so much on information technology. But they were not starting to see the business value or the business benefits of it. So, many people have heard about this productivity paradox, which really a lot of economists and a lot of business scholars were interested in, back in the early to mid 90's. So, that has been something that's always been the larger question. Because even if firms spend on technology, it's not always that they succeed with IT. So, you have to have a lot of internal capabilities that firms have to develop before they understand: how to leverage technology and how to build the complementary capabilities that you need to leverage technology. So, my research has really looked into those aspects of how ones build and leverage these complementary IT capabilities and how to raise their instructor track and trace the value from the investments to these capabilities to eventual financial & market performance. So, in my research projects, I've tried to bring different metrics, in different ways, in which we understand how value is calculated - the matrix for calculating the value and then tracing them backward to some of these investments & investments in capabilities. As technologies change, as new technological opportunities arise for the firms, my research interests also involve. For example, with the big growth IT outsourcing, since the Y2K and subsequently in the decade that followed, I have asked questions about how do firms then used technology outsourcing again for competitive purposes and what is the nature of IT outsourcing contracts, how is the structure of the contracts set up? In terms of, the different the different objectives the clients might have and the vendors might have. Couple of research projects that have pursued since, has looked into, in depth some of these contracts structures. I believe, ours was one of the first study to look into - in great depth - at some of these contracts structures to even understand. For example, intellectual properties that get created through the software systems and how do these intellectual properties get shared between the clients and the vendors. So, lots of these questions - given this broad arc of interest that I have about technology adoption, its leverage using value, there's always new questions to be asked as technologies emerge and as the ways in which organizations think about, how to deploy IT systems constantly - evolving with changes. So, no dearth of research questions. The constraint is always having enough time to pursue your research interests. There is just plenty of exciting questions to ask.