Interview with Tridas Mukhopadhyay

Conducted by Param Vir Singh

Tridas Mukhopadhyay is the Deloitte Consulting Professor of e-Business at the David A. Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. He has published extensively, and has served on the editorial boards of several journals including ISR (SE 2000-2003; AE, 1994-2000), Management Science (AE, 1999- 2003), and MISQ (AE, 1997- 1999).

PARAM: Please reflect on your experiences and the lessons you have learned from (a) being a professor, (b) serving in editorial positions.

TRIDAS: This question is an important one. I really don't find being a professor any different from being a Ph.D. student. The only thing is that now you have to teach. Before that you did not have to teach and you had all the time to yourself. Otherwise, life is quite similar. You are basically a professional student. You are paid a salary to learn. You keep learning, and it really doesn't matter whether you are assistant, or associate, or full, or beyond that - your life does not change, which is a good thing.

With respect to editorial boards, I have done 10-12 years of a lot of editorial work. I liked it a lot in the beginning, especially because I was able to process papers quickly. I knew the network of assistant professors, and that helped in the review work. The responsibilities grew with time however, and eventually it reached a point where I felt that the editorial work was affecting my research. I also found that there are other people - younger people - who are very competent. I believe that it is important to make room for younger people, and decided to step down from editorial work to give them a chance. Personally, I think it has served me well and freed me some time. And they are probably doing a better job as editors!

PARAM: What would your advice to junior faculty be along the dimensions of research, teaching and service? How should they balance the three, and what is the best path to take with respect to tenure?

TRIDAS: These are very good questions. Everybody will tell you that research is more important. It is also true that research is the most portable. And service is least portable because you usually do service to a university, and when you move, the new university may not get much value out of it.

I'll tell you what I tried to do; it has worked well for me. The first time you teach a course you have to spend a lot of time on it. There is no question about that. You also have to like the process of teaching and should have empathy towards your students. You should feel that you are a professor and have a responsibility to make them successful. But I will also caution against being overly responsible. Some faculty feel that they need to have the most recent and most perfect information, and that they need to present in the best possible way to the students. All of these are lofty goals. However, you have to think clearly what you are trying to do. You will better serve your students if you get them interested in a topic and let them do their own digging - years later, if they see similar problems they will know how to handle the situation, to dig deeper and to discover solutions. So, over time, I have come to believe that certain aspects of teaching, like getting details about the latest technologies, are less important than others. Things change over time; what technology exists today will be outdated tomorrow. So a more important responsibility of a good teacher is to get the students excited about a topic and to provide them the opportunity through assignments and the like. That way, they are learning both in the classroom and while doing these assignments.

In terms of balance, I would say spend as much time on research as possible. I used to think of research as a full-time job. Even when I was spending 20-30 hours teaching, I would spend 40 hours on research. When I could, I tried to pick evening classes, as that way, I could spend the day on research. I tried my best to make sure that I was spending 40 hours on research every week. I used to start on Sunday (I try to do that even now) to ensure that I would be one day ahead of the class. In addition to allowing me to do research, it also helped provide a cushion when I had to teach new material. The key is to spend a full week's effort on research every week, whether you are teaching or not. I have sometimes heard people say that they are teaching too much in a particular semester, and so will not be doing research. That is not good. When you come back to research after one semester, you have forgotten some things and there is a huge learning cost to doing that. My suggestion is for you to believe that you are a full time researcher, even if you spend 40 hours on teaching.

PARAM: What would your advice be to doctoral students - how should they work, what should they work on, when should they start research?

TRIDAS: As a Ph.D. student I had a hard time. In my department, the faculty were either very senior and focused on things other than research, while others were very junior and you did not know what they were capable of. So I knocked my head around a bit and started working with a very senior faculty member. After 6 months I did not get anywhere. Then, he gave me a key piece of advice - "Tridas, you don't need to look for an advisor. First you should figure out what kind of problem excites you, and that problem selection is probably the most important part for a Ph.D. student to succeed. It is not all fun - if it were, many more people would be doing it. There will be times when you will get stuck, and if you did not have a sort of love affair with the problem or the area you would be frustrated."

In fact, when I began my Ph.D., my advisor did not have a Ph.D. yet. But that did not stop me from working with him and I don't have any regrets. I think I got the best help that I could get. So the most important thing for a doctoral student is to work on a topic that would get him really excited.

PARAM: Any advice to junior faculty members on working with doctoral students?

TRIDAS: This is the other side of the coin. Really, there is no bar as such. The only thing the junior faculty member has to keep in mind is the quality of the doctoral students. If the quality of the student is good, there is very little risk. Typically, in top institutions, most of the Ph.D. students are very good. So an assistant professor getting involved with a Ph.D. student does not face much risk in a top university. In other universities, the Ph.D. students may not all be equally good. If a junior faculty member gets involved with students who either do not do work, or do not do it well, that is not good investment of their time. So they need to be careful which student they decide to work with.

PARAM: What are your thoughts on research in general - what are some key characteristics that are common to good papers? How is IS (and IS papers) similar/different vis-a-vis other fields (or good papers in other fields)?

TRIDAS: I don't think I have to answer this as it was answered very well by Herb Simon. Herb Simon used to say that a paper really is tied to the problem. This has come in very handy to me, so I will first give a very high level Simon view of research and then give a very practical advice that I got from another faculty who worked with me. The Simon school says that you should pick new exciting topics on which less work has been done, i.e., on which few people have worked. It says that part of the social science research success criterion is "what is the problem?" - until you are quite sure of the potential of the problem you should not be spending too much time on it. He used to tell us not to worry too much about who has done what, that if the problem is good and you chase it and solve it, your work would look different from work others have done. If you want to do something new you are the researcher; you have the freedom to do that. Let the problem take you to new territories which you may not have a lot of experience with. Let the problem dictate what the new methods should be, what the theory should be, and what the results should be. It should all be problem driven, your results should be more interesting and it will most likely be unique.

If it is a good piece of work, you should be able to publish it in an IS journal or non-IS journal. I think more and more schools are open to the fact that you don't have to publish in only the so-called IS journals. Some schools have a list of top journals; if a junior faculty member is in such a school they should find out what this list contains.

I personally believe that if you are doing this kind of work and you want to call it IS, one criterion could be that someone from another discipline could not do the work. It could be that the marketing guy did not know what this technology is and how to get and measure the outcome variable and so there could be a component in the paper that has a technology artifact to it; that makes it an IS paper. Hopefully you know the technology more than others in a business school and they can appreciate the work while recognizing that they could not have done the work themselves because they don't know the underlying mechanism driving the observed behavior.

PARAM: Do you have any advice to junior faculty for getting visibility in the field?

TRIDAS: This is a very good question. As we know, the way the academic review process works publication is a must. By that, I don't mean quantity or quality or whatever that aggregate is. Sometimes people have a couple of papers with lot of impact - many people know about it, and they generate many citations and a lot of excitement.

But as junior faculty, you don't know whether your paper will become highly successful or not. So your first method of defense is to try to publish in the best journal. Barring that you go to a slightly less reputed journal, but avoid bad journals. Avoiding bad journals is not a bad idea - if it is not good work, don't publish it. If it is not good enough for a top tier journal, a second tier journal is okay. But if it is not good enough even for that, just walk away from it. People make mistakes; it is usually better to forget such mistakes.

You can get visibility through conferences and through networks. You should make an effort to get invitations to be a guest speaker at other universities. If you become part of an editorial board, you get a lot of calls. So that could be something to try. One thing I did was to call the people in California and they were interested in inviting me. Once I had an invitation, I called others. I said you know, USC has called me; I would love to come and give a talk at UCI. They said okay you will be there, so come over. Sometime schools like it because they can share the cost. So I made these kinds of tours. Another time I went to Texas and presented in many schools there. Another way of getting visibility is to read other people's work, and to talk to them about it, especially if you like it. Tell them that you liked their work, and ask good questions. That person, even if they are senior, will remember it and recognize that you have thought about the paper. People like to help. The other approach is say I need help, for example, that I need to give some talks; I need help in these kinds of research. And they will often be forthcoming.

PARAM: Should a junior faculty member continue to leverage the ties with their alma mater?

TRIDAS: There are some pragmatic things and there are some institutional things. Let me talk about institutional things first. Institutionally what they would like to see is that you did a thesis and something came out of it. Your advisor may be a co-author on that. Where the institutions get nervous is that if that continues for a very long time and that is the main method of publication that one has adopted. It has happened that people have got hurt because they continue to work with the advisor and they don't have others to work with. So institution-wise, people like to see that you are able to go and work with other people. Sometimes some universities may say they like single author papers.

From a practical point of view, you have to basically leverage all the connections that you have. If you had a good advisor and there is a good friend from your school who went to another institution, why loose that? It is very hard to find good collaborators. From a practical standpoint, unless you have too many choices you have to work with the best you have.

When you are entering in to a collaboration you have to make sure that the senior person is doing the work that he is expected to do. It is true that junior faculty spend more time, but if the senior person does not take interest and does not follow through in a timely manner, or is not really pushing himself or herself, you should retract. You need people who are really engaged. Some people are good at analytics, while others may be good at identifying problems, or in articulating thoughts well. Collaboration in these situations is good. One has to be flexible. You have to ensure that if you are part of a collaborative project, everyone contributes.