Ajay Vinze: How IT impacts nations in the midst of change

Professor of Information Systems Ajay Vinze is on the roster of Fulbright senior specialists. Chosen by their peers and vetted by the U.S. State Department, this distinguished group of renowned, doctorate-level professionals serve a mission similar to that of Fulbright scholars: promoting international understanding through academic exchange.

Do you remember standing on the sidelines of a gymnasium or playing field, waiting to be picked for a softball or soccer team? Imagine waiting to be snapped up when what you’re offering is way more than a mean curve ball or solid kicking skills. Instead, you’re waiting for a chance to journey beyond your home base so you can serve as an ambassador for the U.S. and your field of professional expertise by working on a project that could, ultimately, have impact on an entire country.

This is where Ajay Vinze, professor of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business, stood in 2008 after being named to the roster of Fulbright senior specialists. Chosen by their peers and vetted by the U.S. State Department, this distinguished group of renowned, doctorate-level professionals serve a mission similar to that of Fulbright scholars: promoting international understanding through academic exchange.

Some 800 U.S. faculty and professionals ship out each year to lecture, research and participate in seminars as part of the Fulbright Scholarship program. Fulbright senior specialists like Vinze take shorter trips — usually around three weeks — but they remain on the roster of available specialists for five years, during which countries they’ve expressed an interest in visiting can tap them on the shoulder and say, “yes, join our team.”

First pick

Vinze told Fulbright he wanted to work in the Balkans, and that’s what he put in his specialist application. “I’ve been interested in looking at how information and communications technology (ICT) plays out in countries going through transition,” he says.

For many, he adds, the word “transition” means a country is going from a centrally planned economy, such as what happens under communism, to a free-market economy. “I look at transition as going from one state to any other state,” Vinze notes. And, what caught his eye about the Balkans was Yugoslavia’s division into several nations, including three that really grabbed his attention: Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia.

“In 2008, Slovenia was part of the European Union. Croatia was EU-eligible,” Vinze says, pictured above in 2008 with Sarajevo spread out behind him. “Bosnia was ineligible, and I was curious. What made them ineligible and how could they become eligible?”

Such questions harken back to an area of research Vinze has long explored: the drivers of innovation and development within a transitioning country. “When countries decide to invest in certain amounts of information technology, does that improve quality of life or change the way societal structures exist?” he asks. “These are big questions, but what I’m really trying to do is examine that link between technology and development.”

Believing that technology is a sector countries should leverage to drive their economies, Vinze maintains that support for technology should be reflected in educational and economic policy. Through his Fulbright specialist designation, he had an opportunity to present these ideas to Bosnian leadership communities and be part of academic changes to support educational excellence. (Photo: Vinze with Zlatko Lagumd ija in 2008. Lagumd ija is now the foreign minister of Bosnia.)

Class act

Is this what Vinze set out to do when he applied for designation as a Fulbright specialist? “No, that’s not how it works,” he says. “Typically, you tell the Fulbright team, ‘This is the region I’m interested in, and here is the institution I will associate with.’ Once you’re there, it’s a little loosey-goosey,” he jokes.

Each Fulbright specialist’s role fully develops after he or she is invited to visit another country. As it turns out, Vinze’s colleagues at the University of Sarajevo were hoping to evolve their doctorate-level training to follow a methodology more in line with similar training around the world. Having run the W. P. Carey School’s information systems Ph.D. program from 1999 to 2002, this was a game Vinze knew how to play and win.

Specifically, the Sarajevo scholars wanted their doctorate training to comply with the Bologna Declaration of 1999, a series of reforms put in motion by the European Commission on Education & Training. The aim of this effort is to make European higher education more compatible and comparable to education in other world regions, particularly the U.S. and Asia.

“Because Bosnia was emerging from what was formerly Yugoslavia, it followed the socialist model of education,” Vinze explains. “Historically, that was a very open-ended system. You’d meet with your advisor, do whatever the advisor said you should do and, when the advisor said you were done, you were done. There was no standardized coursework and no clear standards - as a result there was no clear understanding or expectation of expertise at the end of the program.”

Vinze worked with Sarajevo faculty to determine what courses to include in an IS doctorate, as well as what kind of method and domain-area training to require. In this case, the word “method” refers to both teaching and research training.

His efforts have been shaping Sarajevo doctoral education for four years now. Having just returned from Bosnia, he says, “The difference in quality is palpable. You can feel over the four-year period how dramatically the doctoral program has improved.”

Vinze credits his Fulbright affiliation with giving him power to affect such change. “Because Fulbright specialists go with the full tailwinds of the U.S. Government behind them, it helps you do things that have impact in the region,” he says. “With doctoral programs, you’re creating the next generation of professors, the next generation of scholars that will lead up the nation’s education sector.”

South of the border

For his second stint as a Fulbright Senior Specialist, Vinze has decided to stay closer to home. Leveraging his decade old association with Universidad ESAN, a premier educational institution in Peru, he is now planning on building research assets the South American context. The game plan includes working with his Peruvian counterparts and colleagues to help set up a regional research center that will operate in collaboration with leading universities in region. (Picture: presenting to senior executives, Santiago, Chile, 2011)

In 2011 Vinze was called upon by CLADEA (Consejo Latinoamericano de Escuelas de Administración) leadership to serve as a Co-Chair for their Doctoral Consortium. CLADEA is the — one of the most significant and impactful associations of Latin American Business Schools. In 2012, with CLADEA being held in Lima, Peru, Vinze has again been asked to take on a leadership position as Co-Chair for the Doctoral Program. This will provide him the stage to work out his vision related to his Fulbright plans.

Vinze already has proven he can score as a high impact player. Between 2002 and 2007, he ran the W. P. Carey School’s Center for Advancing Business through Information Technology (CABIT), a research institution that earned kudos from Janet Napolitano when she was Arizona’s governor.

“I challenged the center to focus on developing technology in business with the goal of improving the quality of life in Arizona,” Napolitano said in 2006. “CABIT has met this challenge and contributed to our state in a variety of ways.”

Vinze has long been focused on applying technology to real-world problems. “A lot of my initial work was in artificial intelligence and planning systems,” he says. “Over the years, I realized that knowledge in context is more meaningful and professionally appealing for me. When you put your work in context, you can see the value technology drives.”

For instance, Vinze has done extensive work on technology’s role in decision making. “When you inject technology into decision-making spaces, how does decision making change?” he asks. He once examined a well-known and common occurrence — the higher risk tolerance found in group decisions versus those made by individuals — to see if leveraging technology would alter this oft-repeated phenomenon. After experimenting with technology-supported decision making, he found groups’ decisions were not always riskier, but they were “more polarized, either in the direction of risk or caution.”

Through his research, Vinze has also found that technology can moderate “groupthink,” the kind of consensus thinking that can lead to poor decision making because people become less discerning. “Groupthink is associated with many fiascos,” he says, citing the Watergate scandal and Space Shuttle Challenger explosion as two of them. “Those engineers convinced each other that everything was OK, that the O-rings were not such a big problem, so they didn’t consider all the details they might have otherwise examined individually,” he says.

He adds that sometimes groupthink occurs because someone others consider to be an authority makes a proclamation, and everyone else echoes agreement. That’s why, he explains, “when you use technology to make people anonymous — in a chat rooms, for instance — you can take away social norms that we use to get into this groupthink business.”

Vinze approaches his professional agenda with broad strokes and focuses on use inspired research. This causes him to follow interesting, important and timely issues. More recently (2002 to present) Vinze along with ASU colleagues and doctoral students has worked with the Maricopa County Department of Public Health. In this Public Health context, Vinze spearheaded development of decision-making tools that helped healthcare workers distribute scarce vaccine effectively during the outbreak of H1N1 flu.

“The H1N1 effort is a prime example of social embeddedness — world-class research conducted for important public service,” said Michael Goul, the professor who heads the W. P. Carey School’s information systems department. Noting his research productivity and contributions of his work to society through professional application, Prof. Goul who nominated Vinze to receive Arizona State’s Faculty Achievement Award, an honor conferred on Vinze and six other ASU faculty members this year for their “Defining Edge Research and Creative Work.” Vinze was honored in the category of “Professional Application.”

For Vinze, awards like that are nice recognition — and so is being accepted into the Fulbright fold — but what really inspires him is his ability to “impact society.” It is this altruistic drive that has Vinze headed soon to Lima, Peru to start developing that regional research center. With his knowledge and experience, his Latin American colleagues will be gaining a star player for their team.