Cleveland, Ohio originally and then North Midwest in United States near Lake Erie and that's the only place I've lived other than Georgia. I got my PhD there at Case Western Reserve and then I got the job here in beautiful Athens, Georgia and moved down here. Then the types of things I enjoy. I enjoy all sorts of physical activity and I have three kids and a wife and my kids are always keeping me busy doing whatever activity they have but we love doing things outdoors together, we love exercising and playing a variety of things as well, in traveling sometimes we get to travel as a family and that's my favorite things to do.

All right well first let me just, ah, I'm going to get into this kind of a roundabout way. So first let me just point out this that you know often times people think of organizations and of their work life in a very industrial age mindset, right! They think in terms of, you know, will I be an accountant, will I be this, will it be that, they think of industrial age profession. But actually we're in the digital age, right. Where digital technologies are mixing up everything and anything interesting, anything innovative that's happening is happening with digital technologies, Period. And it's this tumultuous innovation that's happening everywhere and at every single front and the the people who can handle digital technologies and understand innovation and how to bring innovations of the world are those who will thrive in a variety of institutions, which is, right! And the reason I'm in the field of information systems and why I think a lot of students should pick this field is because those are the people who are hands on and ushering in many of the innovations within organizations across organizations in society, right. So, and they usually have to you know not all of them can be, so these are of the students who are maybe, choose information systems as a field and they can be very technical or not so technical but either way they have some technical classes. You know in our school you have to have a programming class actually two programming classes, you need to do database management, but then there are some slightly less technical questions with business process management with project management. So they're, they're all these the, it's kind of a balance. We have about fifty percent business oriented classes, fifty percent technical oriented classes and our people are those who can understand both and can boundary span those two areas. So a lot of times our students get jobs as consultants. About seventy five percent of our students anymore get jobs as consultants, where they work for organizations that run around and help organizations change, innovate and implement new technologies that sort of thing. The other quarter work is, is you know what we call, often times, there are certain type of consultants which is inside of a company, that we call business analyst and sometimes these business analysts and consultants are very technical. They could be coders the writing programs and sometimes, they could be not technical at all just managing projects for, for those technical people but either way that, so it's like a continuum across the board in either way they, you know, are working in technically focused arena. So I think it's wonderful and our masters program is a hundred percent online masters program, Masters of business and technology, here at UoG, it's really unique in that it's exactly that sort of thing, it's about half technical, half business. And it really equips people to being prepared to ushering in innovation, technology enabled innovation in organizations and then so it's similar in structure to our undergraduate programs but it is made for folks who are a little bit further along in their careers right, we would expect some organizational experience.

Well so, it looks like my research is all over the place but it's really not. There's a method to it, in my head, but it might not come across in all the papers that I wrote. So to me, the thing I'm interested in is as I mentioned before, we're not in the industrial age, we are in the digital age. Digital is different and this idea of digital innovation, innovation around digital technology is something I want to understand. I am trying to look at it from a number of different angles and I'm really trying to look at the way digital technologies are disrupting the old industrial ways of organizing. If you think of kinda nineteenth century, twentieth century industrial organizations like factory based technologies and production processes. That's how we've organized business schools, that's how we've organized our laws, that's how we've organized every, that's how NASA was organized. And what's happening with the enterprise wide information systems with mobile computing with all the innovations that are out there. We're seeing major transformation, we're seeing different ways people are organizing, in different ways people are going about doing it. So that's what I'm attempting to chronicle the what is different about this type of innovation, I'm doing at an organizational level so NASA was my dissertation that's what I looked at right now. So is in a situation where they had ten differences of one big government agency it had ten different centers in each of these ten different centers they had it, you know sometimes a dozen or so different systems that manage their organization. In the span of a few years they were able to transform their entire organization, to have one backbone system to essentially act as a platform for that organization and they were able to do some really really incredible things with the the way that they organized their agency, that they would have never been able to do before. So I looked at NASA, I looked at the automotive industry and how we're digitizing cars and how the fact that we're using electronic control units, we're integrating and try to control units in cars, it's changing the way that the auto industry is actually organized.I'm looking at the Nature article, that's part of my work with cyber infrastructure. The cyber infrastructure is that layer of scientific activity that involves super computers, big data sets and all the people that enable big supercomputers to co existence and generate what they called Big Science. Well, the cyber infrastructure layer is getting more and more important to science and there again you can almost think of it in terms of science was organized around, in a certain industrial imitations of a hierarchical limitations. And now with the advent of the digital age, you're seeing that the science is transforming right now, so what we're doing is chronicling some of that transformation of science. And then you mentioned some of my worries and so that's what I'm looking at, cyber infrastructure and organizational change, those two general areas and how digital innovations are enabling them to change. Now in recent years one of the really interesting things that I'm also interested in is entrepreneurship. I think there's certain ways we look at the entrepreneurial function in society and I think that's also changing in the digital age. So most recently some of my work that I'm really focusing on is around how digital technologies enable different forms of entrepreneurship, so that's what we're playing around with there. Yeah, that's that's what kind of keeps it all together is this idea that it's up at an organizational or even societal level and it's all about how the digital age is changing what we think we know about these things. And then of course, I also look at it a bit on top how you organize around software development and that also fits in that same story with me. But yeah of course now that we're in the digital age everything is software enabled so software development is no longer some obscure thing that just some random programmers do but it's becoming central to the organization, into their strategy. There we got a few of the one that's coming out that we're actually going to submit to a journal actually. So they're all we have conference papers on all of them but the first one that we're submitting to a journal here is, we are going to submit it the next week or so but it's about the, what we call the digital facade and this is about how entrepreneurial organizations can use digital technology as sort of a front to gain some legitimacy and and to carve out a space of that behind the scenes they can get their act together, that they could satisfy demand.