Clinical faculty: Research and teaching that bridges theory, practice and policy
The mission of the professional school within a research university is a complex mission, and fulfilling the mission requires a diverse faculty team. Clinical faculty work in the area where theory meets and crosses over with business practice, processes and policies. And that's increasingly important when the mission includes being embedded in the community and working on local problems to uncover solutions with global implications. This spring, the department of information systems promoted four of its clinical faculty. Haluk Demirkan and Fred Riggins have been promoted from clinical associate professor to clinical full professor. Sule Balkan has been promoted from clinical assistant professor to clinical associate professor, and Lecturer Matt McCarthy is now a senior lecturer.
There's a tired cliché that describes a university as an ivory tower -- a rarified place where the brilliant think lofty thoughts which may or may not have anything to do with life on the ground.
That's not true anymore -- not at Arizona State University -- and especially not at the W. P. Carey School of Business. The mission of the professional school within a research university encompasses theoretical research, to be sure, but it also includes the application of theory to business practice and to policy. And this is a two-way flow: Research originates ideas that alter the working world, but the practice of business also percolates questions that need research and solution.
It's a complex mission, and fulfilling the mission requires a diverse faculty team. The team includes those who are on the traditional career path, which includes tenure and its accompanying strict requirements for achievement at the highest levels of research and publication.
But the broadening variety of tasks and responsibilities in Arizona State University's "New American University" philosophy calls for top-notch faculty who are not bound to the strictures of tenure. Clinical faculty, even more so than tenure-track faculty, work in the area where theory meets and crosses over with business practice, processes and policies. And that's increasingly important when the mission includes being embedded in the community and working on local problems to uncover solutions with global implications.
This spring, the department of information systems promoted four of its clinical faculty. Haluk Demirkan and Fred Riggins have been promoted from clinical associate professor to clinical full professor. Sule Balkan has been promoted from clinical assistant professor to clinical associate professor, and Lecturer Matt McCarthy is now a senior lecturer.
"The promotions reward our colleagues on the basis of their performance in the context of the broad mission of the W.P. Carey School and ASU," said department Chairman Michael Goul. "Specifically they recognize each individual's accomplishments and the important role they play in translating research into practice, explicitly connecting theory to best practices, disseminating results -- either of their own research or their interpretation/synthesis of existing research and theories -- to peers, industry stakeholders and, of course, to our students."
"They've also demonstrated a commitment to service," Goul added, "by contributing to the lives of our students, the governance of our department and school and their ongoing participation in professional organizations and societies affiliated with our IS profession."
That translates to a dynamic research environment and a top quality experience for students. Today we bring you brief profiles of these scholars.
Haluk Demirkan
Haluk Demirkan maintained a rigorous schedule while he was in graduate school. While at the University of Florida pursuing a masters degree in engineering, post-masters studies and finally, the Ph.D. he was working full time -- at AT&T, Citibank and MicroStrategy. Though he enjoyed his experience in industry, Demirkan said he always knew he would teach at the university level.
When he heard of an opening in the W. P. Carey School's Department of Information Systems, Demirkan believed his background in data warehousing and business intelligence made him a good candidate. Today he teaches graduate courses in project management, IT services management, and data and information management. He also teaches in several platforms of the W. P. Carey MBA and masters programs, and will be among the faculty who teach in the department's new online version of the master of science of information management (MSIM) starting in January.
Demirkan?s research area is service science and innovation, finding ways to make companies and processes more service-oriented and help them deliver better customer service, utilizing IT in such services as healthcare, education and financial services. He has authored or co-authored more than thirty journal publications, and he has recently co-edited two research books titled "The Science of Service Systems" and "Implementation of Service Systems."
In 2011, he was ranked 50th among the top 100 researchers worldwide according to the Association for Information Systems sanctioned worldwide research rankings.
His research informs his classroom work, and vice versa. "Students learn up-to-date and current information," he says.
Demirkan co-founded the ASU student chapter of the Project Management Institute, which helps students master the field and find jobs. He is also advisor to ASU?s Turkish-American student organization, a club spanning all majors, graduate and undergraduate students, to connect cultures.
While Demirkan says he finds teaching rewarding. In the corporate world, management would dictate his work. In academia, he enjoys independence: "I can follow organizations' needs better, and whatever I have a curiosity about," he says, "I can pursue those interests for research."
Fred Riggins
When Fred Riggins began teaching e-commerce in 1996, he pioneered the use of computers in the classroom. Before every class he would load his desktop computer onto a cart and ferry it into his classroom, where it would crash and require rebooting over and over.
But it was an exciting time for the Internet. "Things were changing so fast in those days," he says.
In Riggins' 18 years teaching, the rate of change in technology has accelerated, and he's had to keep abreast. He joined the Information Systems faculty three years ago in the Master of Science and Information Management (MSIM) program, teaching graduate and undergrad students how IT can manage online business operations.
He's been present from a time when information management meant you owned a dictionary, an almanac and a set of encyclopedias. Every semester, he estimates, a third of his course material is new.
To hold those increasingly short attention spans, he spikes his presentations with videos and online demonstrations. All that makes teaching exciting: "The fact is that it is changing so much," he says. "It keeps you on your toes."
His research in e-commerce explores the relationship between buyer and seller when companies go electronic. Should online sales be priced at the same rate as a physical store? How do the demographics of online clients compare with those in person? At one time, he says, Internet shoppers were more affluent than those in physical stores. Now the digital divide is shrinking.
Riggins also is working in the nascent field of peer-to-peer lending. On such web sites as kiva.org, individuals in developed nations give microloans to people in the Third World.
"I?ve tried to move in the direction of how IT helps poverty relief," Riggins says. His research explore the characteristics of the lenders and those who receive the loans. He?s found an "identification bias" that has lenders preferring to help people who are like themselves. Farmers loan to farmers, shopkeepers to shopkeepers. But that might not be best for the community, he says: "This is so new we?re just starting to understand it."
Teaching allows him the flexibility to take on such projects. And for many of his graduate students already working in the business community, "I feel like I?m making a contribution."
In a rapidly changing field, he says, "interaction with students keeps me young."
Sule Balkan
In 1998, the business world was booming, and when Sule Balkan earned her Ph.D in economics, opportunities were everywhere. Balkan jumped in with both feet.
"I wanted to make a business impact," she says.
For 10 years, she worked as an econometrician in international customer information management for American Express and then as director of information management for its spinoff, Ameriprise Financial, a financial planning company. Her job took her to destinations including England, Italy, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Using statistical tools, Balkan was charged with forecasting customer behavior at American Express, anticipating, for instance, how clients might respond to special offers and who was likely to default on their accounts. Creating such predictive models, she says, was hard work: "The devil is in the details." But she enjoyed it.
A decade later, she was eager to share the skills she had acquired. "I wanted to teach what I had learned," she says. "I was ready for a career change."
In May of 2008, she joined the information systems faculty to teach programming concepts. Today she teaches honors information systems. "I try to make it as applied as possible," she says.
Students learn, she believes, by seeing the relevance of a course. In her class, they study how to help companies build a competitive edge through IT.
When she began at ASU, a colleague asked Balkan to join his research in e-health. She brought to the table her extensive background in statistical analysis and dexterity with SAS, a business analytic software program. Vance Wilson and Balkan collaborated on research into customer trends in the healthcare field, such as how patients seek information online, how appointments are managed online.
After Wilson left ASU, Balkan began working with department chair Michael Goul, who shares her interest in predictive models. They have co-authored papers on design principals of those models and how prediction markets can help select predictive models. Because the same models can be used in all industries, companies can deploy them as they see fit -- for instance, in their fraud, marketing or accounting divisions.
"It is very exciting and break-through work," Balkan says.
Balkan is the founding academic advisor for the new Women in IT Club, which creates awareness of the dropping enrollment and employment rates for women in IT.
The world has changed since Balkan was a teaching assistant more than a decade ago. Through encounters with graduates at American Express, she learned how to prepare them for the job market. In her classroom, she takes a practical approach.
"This is how I look at my students: I would want to hire them."
Matthew McCarthy
Matt McCarthy tells a little known story about how he became a teacher. It involves persistence, crossed phone lines and fate.
McCarthy was running a successful consultancy firm specializing in data base application design. When other companies faltered, his proved invulnerable. But at age 39 he resolved to be a college professor by 50.
Graduating at the top of his class with a master of science in management at Northern Arizona University in 2003, he hit a road block when he applied for the W. P. Carey School's information systems Ph.D. program.
Piqued, he telephoned then-dean Larry Penley, who referred him to Robert St. Louis, who was department chairman at the time. McCarthy says he thought he was being brushed off, but St. Louis invited him to lunch the next day. At lunch McCarthy found himself revealing his dream to teach. St. Louis ended up offering McCarthy an adjunct position and that fall made him a full-time lecturer ? eight years ahead of his target.
McCarthy says his decision to make that phone call was "one of the best of my life."
As instructor in CIS 105, McCarthy estimates he's taught some 25,000 students -- 400 at a time -- in his eight years at ASU. One of the first class business majors take, CIS 105 teaches students the business applications of information systems, a fluid field.
"The subject matter changes monthly," McCarthy says, demanding that he keep pace with evolving technology. In turn, he learns from his tech-savvy students, whom he calls "awesome."
McCarthy has written two textbooks on business applications and computing. One of his research projects involved an artificially intelligent medical intake decision engine that uses data-neutral patient intake forms employing relational database structures. The process suggests a diagnosis and gives a broad picture of the patient?s health.
Outside the classroom, McCarthy is faculty advisor to DISC (Department of Information Systems Club) and the Black Business Student Association.
This year, McCarthy won the Huizingh Award for Classroom Innovation. Frustrated with teaching large and unwieldy lecture courses that required numerous teaching assistants and lacked consistency, he consulted educational publishers and found a way to adapt the program online. The class is now less expensive to offer, reduced the number of assistants and standardized the lecture. And, the program was impervious to cheating.
McCarthy credits support from his department for helping him excel at teaching.
"They make it easy for me," he says. "They are good at what they do."
July, 2011
When he heard of an opening in the W. P. Carey School's Department of Information Systems, Demirkan believed his background in data warehousing and business intelligence made him a good candidate. Today he teaches graduate courses in project management, IT services management, and data and information management. He also teaches in several platforms of the W. P. Carey MBA and masters programs, and will be among the faculty who teach in the department's new online version of the master of science of information management (MSIM) starting in January.
Demirkan?s research area is service science and innovation, finding ways to make companies and processes more service-oriented and help them deliver better customer service, utilizing IT in such services as healthcare, education and financial services. He has authored or co-authored more than thirty journal publications, and he has recently co-edited two research books titled "The Science of Service Systems" and "Implementation of Service Systems."
In 2011, he was ranked 50th among the top 100 researchers worldwide according to the Association for Information Systems sanctioned worldwide research rankings.
His research informs his classroom work, and vice versa. "Students learn up-to-date and current information," he says.
Demirkan co-founded the ASU student chapter of the Project Management Institute, which helps students master the field and find jobs. He is also advisor to ASU?s Turkish-American student organization, a club spanning all majors, graduate and undergraduate students, to connect cultures.
While Demirkan says he finds teaching rewarding. In the corporate world, management would dictate his work. In academia, he enjoys independence: "I can follow organizations' needs better, and whatever I have a curiosity about," he says, "I can pursue those interests for research."
Fred Riggins
When Fred Riggins began teaching e-commerce in 1996, he pioneered the use of computers in the classroom. Before every class he would load his desktop computer onto a cart and ferry it into his classroom, where it would crash and require rebooting over and over.
But it was an exciting time for the Internet. "Things were changing so fast in those days," he says.
In Riggins' 18 years teaching, the rate of change in technology has accelerated, and he's had to keep abreast. He joined the Information Systems faculty three years ago in the Master of Science and Information Management (MSIM) program, teaching graduate and undergrad students how IT can manage online business operations.
He's been present from a time when information management meant you owned a dictionary, an almanac and a set of encyclopedias. Every semester, he estimates, a third of his course material is new.
To hold those increasingly short attention spans, he spikes his presentations with videos and online demonstrations. All that makes teaching exciting: "The fact is that it is changing so much," he says. "It keeps you on your toes."
His research in e-commerce explores the relationship between buyer and seller when companies go electronic. Should online sales be priced at the same rate as a physical store? How do the demographics of online clients compare with those in person? At one time, he says, Internet shoppers were more affluent than those in physical stores. Now the digital divide is shrinking.
Riggins also is working in the nascent field of peer-to-peer lending. On such web sites as kiva.org, individuals in developed nations give microloans to people in the Third World.
"I?ve tried to move in the direction of how IT helps poverty relief," Riggins says. His research explore the characteristics of the lenders and those who receive the loans. He?s found an "identification bias" that has lenders preferring to help people who are like themselves. Farmers loan to farmers, shopkeepers to shopkeepers. But that might not be best for the community, he says: "This is so new we?re just starting to understand it."
Teaching allows him the flexibility to take on such projects. And for many of his graduate students already working in the business community, "I feel like I?m making a contribution."
In a rapidly changing field, he says, "interaction with students keeps me young."
Sule Balkan
In 1998, the business world was booming, and when Sule Balkan earned her Ph.D in economics, opportunities were everywhere. Balkan jumped in with both feet.
"I wanted to make a business impact," she says.
For 10 years, she worked as an econometrician in international customer information management for American Express and then as director of information management for its spinoff, Ameriprise Financial, a financial planning company. Her job took her to destinations including England, Italy, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Using statistical tools, Balkan was charged with forecasting customer behavior at American Express, anticipating, for instance, how clients might respond to special offers and who was likely to default on their accounts. Creating such predictive models, she says, was hard work: "The devil is in the details." But she enjoyed it.
A decade later, she was eager to share the skills she had acquired. "I wanted to teach what I had learned," she says. "I was ready for a career change."
In May of 2008, she joined the information systems faculty to teach programming concepts. Today she teaches honors information systems. "I try to make it as applied as possible," she says.
Students learn, she believes, by seeing the relevance of a course. In her class, they study how to help companies build a competitive edge through IT.
When she began at ASU, a colleague asked Balkan to join his research in e-health. She brought to the table her extensive background in statistical analysis and dexterity with SAS, a business analytic software program. Vance Wilson and Balkan collaborated on research into customer trends in the healthcare field, such as how patients seek information online, how appointments are managed online.
After Wilson left ASU, Balkan began working with department chair Michael Goul, who shares her interest in predictive models. They have co-authored papers on design principals of those models and how prediction markets can help select predictive models. Because the same models can be used in all industries, companies can deploy them as they see fit -- for instance, in their fraud, marketing or accounting divisions.
"It is very exciting and break-through work," Balkan says.
Balkan is the founding academic advisor for the new Women in IT Club, which creates awareness of the dropping enrollment and employment rates for women in IT.
The world has changed since Balkan was a teaching assistant more than a decade ago. Through encounters with graduates at American Express, she learned how to prepare them for the job market. In her classroom, she takes a practical approach.
"This is how I look at my students: I would want to hire them."
Matthew McCarthy
Matt McCarthy tells a little known story about how he became a teacher. It involves persistence, crossed phone lines and fate.
McCarthy was running a successful consultancy firm specializing in data base application design. When other companies faltered, his proved invulnerable. But at age 39 he resolved to be a college professor by 50.
Graduating at the top of his class with a master of science in management at Northern Arizona University in 2003, he hit a road block when he applied for the W. P. Carey School's information systems Ph.D. program.
Piqued, he telephoned then-dean Larry Penley, who referred him to Robert St. Louis, who was department chairman at the time. McCarthy says he thought he was being brushed off, but St. Louis invited him to lunch the next day. At lunch McCarthy found himself revealing his dream to teach. St. Louis ended up offering McCarthy an adjunct position and that fall made him a full-time lecturer ? eight years ahead of his target.
McCarthy says his decision to make that phone call was "one of the best of my life."
As instructor in CIS 105, McCarthy estimates he's taught some 25,000 students -- 400 at a time -- in his eight years at ASU. One of the first class business majors take, CIS 105 teaches students the business applications of information systems, a fluid field.
"The subject matter changes monthly," McCarthy says, demanding that he keep pace with evolving technology. In turn, he learns from his tech-savvy students, whom he calls "awesome."
McCarthy has written two textbooks on business applications and computing. One of his research projects involved an artificially intelligent medical intake decision engine that uses data-neutral patient intake forms employing relational database structures. The process suggests a diagnosis and gives a broad picture of the patient?s health.
Outside the classroom, McCarthy is faculty advisor to DISC (Department of Information Systems Club) and the Black Business Student Association.
This year, McCarthy won the Huizingh Award for Classroom Innovation. Frustrated with teaching large and unwieldy lecture courses that required numerous teaching assistants and lacked consistency, he consulted educational publishers and found a way to adapt the program online. The class is now less expensive to offer, reduced the number of assistants and standardized the lecture. And, the program was impervious to cheating.
McCarthy credits support from his department for helping him excel at teaching.
"They make it easy for me," he says. "They are good at what they do."
July, 2011
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