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Through an IT lens: Professor Raghu Santanam

The mile markers in an academic career include the first post -- as assistant professor -- when scholars prove their research and teaching mettle. If successful, they are awarded tenure and the accompanying "associate professor" title. The top rung -- called "full" professor -- is reserved for a relatively small number, who are exceptional at teaching, have generously served their institution and discipline, and have provided leadership in the development of new knowledge. This spring, Raghu Santanam reached that peak.

2011-06-08

When Raghu Santanam graduated from the National Institute of Engineering in the early 1990's, India's economy was opening up and new information technology companies were recruiting heavily on campuses. That's how Santanam found himself, an electronics engineer at his first job, helping to rebuild a retirement information system for a major U.S. company. "What I was doing was not related to the core of my education, but it opened up my mind to start thinking about how IT was transforming companies," he said. "I started to look through the lens of IT, and it inspired me to pursue advanced education. I thought, 'I need to get a masters degree in this field.' I wanted to learn about how information technology is changing organizations." That was the beginning of a remarkable research and teaching career, during which Santanam has indeed explored the way IT transforms business. The mile markers in an academic career include the first post -- as assistant professor -- when scholars prove their research and teaching mettle. If successful, they are awarded tenure and the accompanying "associate professor" title. The top rung -- called "full" professor -- is reserved for a relatively small number, who are exceptional at teaching, have generously served their institution and discipline, and have provided leadership in the development of new knowledge. This spring, Santanam reached that peak. Ajay Vinze, the Earl and Gladys Davis Distinguished Professor of Information Systems, is a friend and collaborator. He had this to say about Santanam's promotion: "Raghu's just an outstanding researcher -- very conscientious, certainly very knowledgeable about technology and technology trends. But the important thing, I think, is that along with those extensive research skills, he also has the ability to see the value of these technologies in context. He can transfer very high-level research into very understandable terms both for the business community and for other stakeholders." "With this well-deserved promotion, Raghu Santanam has achieved the highest level of academic recognition," adds department Chairman Michael Goul. "Raghu's research has resulted in significant contributions to business and information systems knowledge. He has earned an impressive international reputation as a scholar in important research areas, and he will undoubtedly be a well-respected leader in those and other fields for many years to come." Path to ASU Santanam's initial insight -- that IT was transforming business -- lead him to the Indian Institute of Technology for a master's degree. It was a research-oriented program, and his master?s thesis ran 100-plus pages. He knew going in that he enjoyed research, but the program solidified his desire to become an academic. Next stop: the State University of New York at Buffalo. Home in India was a tropical climate, and Raghu and his new bride had "anticipated" snow. The fifteen-minute walk to the bus during Buffalo-style winters gave them the taste they were expecting! Santanam was studying under a Woodburn Fellowship, focusing his work on business process modeling. The fellowship freed him from the teaching and assistantship duties usually associated with a doctoral program. As a result, he was able to earn his M.S. in Computer Science in 1997. He then moved into the Ph.D. program, where he would write his dissertation under the guidance of Prof. H. Raghav Rao, now the SUNY Distinguished Service Professor of Management Science and Systems. Santanam's dissertation, written at a time when "business process engineering" was a big buzz word in the IT world, made the case that "it was important that we understand business processes before we implement them," Santanam says. "It took up some of the fundamental issues related to business process modeling." The piece was well-received, because though Santanam did not formally receive his Ph.D. until 1999, he landed his first academic job in 1998, accepting a position as Assistant Professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business. In the years since, Santanam has served in several key roles in the department, including director of the IS doctoral program and research director for the Center for Advancing Business Through Information Technology (CABIT). He continues to serve as program director for the Master of Science in Information Management (MSIM). Mentor Rao is unsurprised by his former student's success. Santanam had five papers published before he graduated from the Ph. D program, Rao noted. Most are lucky to have one. "Santanam was an extraordinary student," Rao says. "By the time he graduated, not only did he have an outstanding research record in the areas of business modeling and collaborative decision making, [but] was an excellent teacher as well." Research: making a meaningful contribution Growing up, Santanam was taught by his parents to work hard at his studies, because education is something you can carry throughout your life. That was the spark, and when he discovered the academic world, he realized it was a good place to fulfill another drive -- to make a meaningful contribution to society. "Academia is one of the few professions where what you do -- with your teaching and your research -- you contribute to the larger society," he explained. "It gives you the independence to think on your own, be creative, and figure out for yourself what it is that you want to do, and what you want to take a leadership role in, to build the knowledge." In developing his research focus, Santanam has looked for big challenges: areas where information systems can help organizations work better. His first area of focus was business process, beginning while he was still in graduate school. He has looked at business process design issues, and the interaction of allocation decision, incentives and information processing. "Through my research, I have shown how incentive design overshadows the impact of resource allocation decisions in business processes," Santanam explained. "In recent years, I have continued the analysis of incentive compatible mechanisms with a focus on commoditized business processes and outsourcing contexts. An inevitable consequence of IT enablement of business processes is standardization and, in some cases, commoditization. This will fundamentally alter the focus from studying internal coordination processes to market-mediated coordination processes. My future research in this area will aim to address intermediation approaches, pricing, and incentives and disincentives for capacity investments in large-scale process environments." A second stream studies the potentially far-reaching impact of IT in the healthcare industry. While other sectors remain mired in the economic doldrums, health care is growing at a steady clip, and yet for all of its strength -- and wealth -- health care continues to battle massive issues in the realm of IT -- issues that potentially impact quality of care. Electronic patient records, for example, rarely migrate from department to the other. Patients are often asked for the same information, over and over, as they move from one office to the next. "But these systems need to talk to each other," Santanam says. "Information needs to be able to flow between systems ? between care givers and insurance companies, for instance. But even within a hospital, your outpatient records are not necessarily compatible with your inpatient records. People go into these settings with the assumption that [all their information will be there] but that's not true. There's just so much more work that needs to be done at the hospital level. And this is something that is going on at many prominent hospitals -- not just smaller ones." Making access to these records more seamless would seem to be a fairly simple task, but because of the nature of the business, it's really not. Health care has moved forward in a unique (and muddled) way regarding its IT initiatives. "This is partly because of history," Santanam says. "Hospitals have had a very decentralized approach to implementing IT. They have made, for instance, discreet decisions, saying, 'This is the system we'll use for outpatient services,' but those decisions are ultimately disjointed from the inpatient systems. Even those two systems sometimes have trouble talking to each other. And then the other reason is that a lot of hospitals have merged in recent years. A lot of those mergers happened in the 1990s, and many organizations are still in the process of retiring old systems and moving into much more integrated systems. But that's a big challenge." The latest issue to attract Santanam's eye is the emergence of consumer-oriented information systems. His first project examined customer willingness to pay for software and services. A subsequent project tackled customer loyalty and satisfaction in the area of consumer software systems. "I firmly believe that consumer adoption issues related to services, systems and processes will be a fertile and significant area of future research," he wrote. New role The new title brings with it opportunities for Santanam to explore different and expanded roles. "On the teaching side," he said, "there's the opportunity to take a broader perspective on curriculum development." That's one reason why he will continue as faculty director of the MSIM program. Santanam also hopes to "build more bridges with partners outside the business school" -- academics as well as practitioners. Santanam is also looking at the overarching issues facing higher education. "There are concerns about how investments in academia will happen in the future," he said. "The burden will be on faculty to rethink the kind of work they are doing, and hopefully I'll be able to contribute, being in the very middle of it." Reports on Raghu Santanam's research:

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Through an IT lens: Professor Raghu Santanam

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