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Perhaps one of the ways this digital age has subconsciously affected the way nearly everybody thinks is that people often find it natural to ask some variants of “Is it either this way? Or that way?”. This implies that there may only be a dichotomous or binary choice between the essential alternatives. In SIS, we often have to work out creative ways of conducting our teaching and research to avoid many of the conventionally strict either-or trade-offs that often characterise academic education and scholarship.
When we interviewed the undergraduates, they frequently asked us, “Is this bachelor's programme more focused on business? Or on IT?”
At the outset of a course, undergraduate or professional masters students will often ask, “Will this course be theoretical? Or practical?” Even PhD students ask a variant of this question in the form of “Will this course emphasise pure theory? Or the use of theory in the context of application?”
Sometimes, when we interviewed prospective faculty members, they asked us, “Does SIS put more emphasis on research? Or on education?” Or they might ask, “Is it more important for SIS research to be published in good places? Or to solve real problems and be relevant?”
Underlying all of these questions is an implicit assumption that it must be “either or” and can not be some degree of both.
Now we cannot be wishy-washy with respect to answering the types of questions noted above. An institution of strength and excellence cannot attempt to be all things to all people or else it will not have focus or character. So we do indeed need to take a stand with respect to these questions. Yet, that being said, to the greatest extent possible, we try to avoid the extremes of “either or” and try to reframe situations away from the limited set of “either or” alternatives.
This often brings us face-to-face with the challenge of how to creatively construct alternatives that provide a workable balance of content or of excellence that SIS is seeking.
“Well, I suppose that is possible, but that takes extra effort.” is a usual reply from both students and faculty. Indeed it does. It is easier and certainly more efficient in terms of discussion and decision making to have a clear-cut and dogmatic stance towards “It is only this way and not that way”. It certainly takes more commitment and time, and more collaborative effort, to bring together what can ordinarily be conflicting requirements into a balanced design and workable execution that is well-aligned with our aspirations for quality in research, education, outreach and people development.
For example, since our creation in 2003, we have been working on designing and delivering educational programmes that achieve a real fusion between IT-grounded education or designing, creating and leveraging IT solutions in business settings and a business or social science related education delivered by the other parts of SMU.
To better achieve the integration across the IT educational component and the business or social science educational components, we strongly encourage our undergraduates to do the extra course work required for a second major. Some students even go beyond the second major and do the additional work for a full double set of bachelor's degrees. The additional courses required for a second major enable students to get the additional depth across the technology aspects, the business or social science aspects and the domain or application aspects. It also provides more time and opportunity to do more of the integrative project work where both business and IT are fused together.
Similarly, this is why we advise, motivate and even push our undergraduates and professional master's students to build capabilities across our three SIS foundation pillars. The three foundation pillars span across Information Technology and Systems, specific industry domain expertise and selected business or social science disciplinary training.
By having students build curiosity, background and selective depth within and across these three pillars, it enables them to see that the world need not be viewed in terms of the dichotomy of “only business” or “only IT”.
This also relates to why we take the time to carefully screen and select our students - undergraduates, professional master's and Ph.D. - through the interview processes we have established over the years. We need to find students with an open mind and passion for bridging across the technology part of IT, the application part of IT and the business and social science contexts in which IT technology and applications are used. Students with a dogmatic “either or” mentality will not feel comfortable in our world. Students who are preoccupied with determining if the degree programme is “more this” or “more that” will not know how to take full advantage of our environment. Nor will they thrive after graduating to the same extent as their peers who graduate having fully embraced the interdisciplinary nature of the programme, and found various ways to fuse together the IT side with their business or social science side, within the context of some type of industry domain or organisational setting.
It is indeed a constant and ongoing challenge to take the time to refine our courses to provide what we believe is an appropriate balance between providing foundations in concepts, analysis and methods, and also providing strong experiential, hands-on learning experiences with real-world applications. We are always conversing with our faculty to think through how to improve the design and delivery of our courses. The never ending challenge is to create courses with what we believe is the appropriate methodological or foundation content, while at the same time having the appropriate degree of contextualisation with real-world, business-oriented examples. An additional challenge is to figure out how to strongly reinforce the content with experiential and interactive learning and practice experiences, and doing so in a way that links back to the concepts and abstractions. We also support many of our faculty, especially (but not exclusively) our practice faculty, to create the new types of textbooks and teaching materials needed to execute our desired approach for integrating problem solving foundations, application skills, real-world examples and interactive learning.
This mindset of not getting trapped in a corner because of the constraints of “either-or” thinking is why we designed our Ph.D. programme in Information Systems to produce graduates who will be capable of
• collaborating with faculty members from different research areas;
• designing technology solutions for real-world problems and applications; and
• while still producing top-rate academic publications
Is this easy or time minimising for either the Ph.D. students or the faculty members to create a programme that achieves strong results along all three of these dimensions? No! But we strongly believe that if we change our vision of the Ph.D. programme, and say that only one of the three items noted above is really important (for example, the third item), then the programme becomes less interesting and distinctive, and less well-aligned with the purpose and vision of SIS.
We expect our SIS faculty members to be high-quality research scholars and educators, as well as good academic community citizens. We do our best to nurture, enable and incentivize them to strive for excellence across research, education, as well as service. We strongly believe there is no either-or conflict between published research scholarship that can be important to a particular (or even wide-spread) academic community, and at the same time have practical problem solving relevance and economic potential.
We evaluate our faculty under the guiding philosophy of “balanced excellence” along multiple dimensions (research, teaching, service), as well as being exceptionally strong in at least one dimension (research for tenure track, teaching or service for practice track).The fact that we consider multiple dimensions, with some flexibility for weighting across the dimensions in the evaluation of the faculty's performance, gives us some degree of flexibility with respect to dealing with the harsh constraints and realities of the either or trade-offs with respect to research quality, research productivity, and education.
In SIS, we do our best to encourage our faculty to look at research problems in ways to see the potential for developing the analytic method or theory side of their work, as well as the application and impact side of their work. Similarly, to see the IS technology side of the problem, as well as the IS management side of the problem, even though they might only be focusing on one or the other side, given their particular expertise and research directions.
We invest a lot of time with faculty and staff during recruitment as well as on a sustained basis year after year to get them to understand our SIS strategy for research and projects, as visualised in this image.
We do our best to filter our faculty and staff who can only see the world in terms of one of the three (bottom to top) levels shown in the graphic (basic disciplinary building blocks, or system and applications, or industry domains). Similarly, we do our best to find and nurture faculty and staff who are deep in one of our five main SIS areas of Information Systems Technology or Management (the middle level of the image), but whose interests also straddle more than one of these five areas. This is all part of the effort to create a culture and environment that has a minimum degree of rigid or dogmatic “either or” thinking.
In summary, it is indeed possible to move away from a rigid or even dogmatic mindset tightly constrained by “either-or” thinking. But it requires a lot more time and effort on the part of our students, faculty and staff due to the need to achieve a more sophisticated type of understanding and also to achieve strength along more than one disciplinary dimension or type of capability. It also takes more intensive collaborative effort and interaction to work out balanced designs that meet multiple objectives.
People who join the SIS community in any capacity need to be ready to make this investment in time and effort in order to go beyond the constraints of either-or thinking. The benefit, of course, is that it leads to a much more interesting world, and to a much greater range of personal and professional possibilities.
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