I'm originally from India. I grew up in India and got my degrees in Biology, MBA and Law from there. I worked for a couple of years before coming to the US for higher education. Other than that, I spent some time on sabbatical in different parts of the world: New Zealand, England and Singapore. I enjoy travelling and playing table tennis, often called ping pong. I enjoy different kinds of cuisines. I don't find as much time to read as I would like to, other than reading a lot of the academic stuff that we have to.

My research is primarily in the Business Value of IT Investments and I specialized that topic into Healthcare research, because that comes from my work experience. I worked for a number of years in Healthcare. That is why a lot of my research is in Healthcare. I do work in other areas as well. I've done some work in the Business Value of IT and the Learning Curves in Supply Chain Management. I worked with Oil and Natural Gas Company to understand how they implemented innovation through IT. Those are primarily my research interests: how do we extract more value from all the IT investment that we make. We now surpass the efficiency and profitability metrics, and are looking at metrics that are more innovation related, list mitigation, value to consumers and so on. One of the insights that I have gained from my research is that the human factors actually matter a lot more than what I believed many years ago. It's not an issue of IT Value or IT not producing value, as sometimes is the case. It is about convincing people, the agency of managers and users of technology, to be able to exploit that in the context of their business. With that, I found that the agency issues, particularly when we're dealing with knowledge workers (we are all becoming more and more knowledge workers), technology is going to be less of an issue. How do we place the technology in the context of their work and of their decision making is really what will matter more going forward.

Sometimes it is serendipity, some of those things you come across by accident. Sometimes it is something that you noticed as part of your research and that seemed to be an anomaly, that had unexplainable results. It takes you down a path that eventually leads you to an interesting research topic. In my case, the Business Value of IT is something that I was doing as part of my industry work at that time. I came to academia later. In working with my organization and my colleagues, I found that we were making very large investments in technology and we were not seeing the results that we wanted to see. I was not able to explain why, when we had such a wonderful system that did all these marvelous things, would people not use it. Around the same time, there was an announcement for a special issue of JMIS that was calling for papers on Business Value of IT. My colleague and I started targeting our work towards that special issue because we had a definite goal. We were fortunate that the paper got accepted. That put us on the path to exploring more research in Business Value of IT. Interestingly, while I was working on that paper, I was preparing this table where I was putting down previous studies that had explored that area. I noticed a pattern that as you move away from the process level of IT investment, the results tend to become either inconclusive or sometimes even negative compared to IT investment. That led to another paper which appeared in ISR as a meta-analysis of the discipline. That put me solidly on the path to Business Value of IT. We all know, as consumers of healthcare, that it is an area that we are struggling with as a nation. There's always a rich fertile ground to research there. That's something I continue to do. In terms of how I decide what to persue, it has to be something that is of interest to us to the extent that we understand a little bit about the context and it brings richness to our own writing. It's not just looking at a problem or a solution from a data analysis perspective. We can add color to that in our writings and that makes the story richer. My suggestion is, for people who are looking for projects and topics to work on, to find something that they personally find interesting. Either something they have experienced, or something they have experienced the pain of, something that makes them think that there is something here. I also realize that there is some level of practicality where you have access to data. If you don't have access to data, it's hard to do research. If you're not interested in the topic and if it doesn't excite you, then it becomes a little bit boring as you move forward.