Director's Letter

I am honored and privileged to have been appointed the new Director of CRITO. This is an exciting time for all of us who conduct research on IT and organizations. The world continues to be transformed by information technologies. Information technologies are enabling new strategies, innovative ways of doing business, and increasing economic opportunities. Witness the impact of Web 2.0, the adoption of open source models in numerous business contexts beyond software, the inexorable move to the real-time enterprise, and the rise of IT-enabled social entrepreneurship.

I want to begin by acknowledging our enormous collective gratitude to Ken Kraemer for his dedicated leadership and for the opportunities that CRITO has offered to so many of us. Whether it was encouraging us to apply to the NSF for research grants, reviewing our grant proposals, inviting us to work with him on his research projects, or mentoring us individually, Ken did so tirelessly and selflessly. It is no accident that UCI’s IT faculty ranked 3rd globally in the 2008 Financial Times rankings of business schools.

Under Ken’s leadership, CRITO researchers pioneered the study of the impacts of information technology (IT) on organizations and society. Many major projects were undertaken well before they were in the public consciousness. Rob Kling studied how intensive computerization transforms work practices and how computerization entails many social choices. Ken Kraemer, John King, Jim Danziger and Bill Dutton studied the role of IT in Government before the term e-government was coined. Alladi Venkatesh and Nick Vitalari began their examination of the use of new media and information technologies in the home and their impact on family life and home-based work life in the mid-eighties.

CRITO researchers have also informed key debates pertaining to IT. When the conventional wisdom argued that IT did not contribute to productivity, CRITO researchers including Sanjeev Dewan and Ken Kraemer were active in demonstrating IT’s significant economic benefits. We were among the first to recognize the incredible decentralizing impacts of technology on business and society when many argued for technology’s centralizing influence.

I hope to continue this tradition of conducting path breaking research and informing key debates and thereby developing CRITO into a truly world class center of excellence. My goal is to have CRITO seen by academics, business executives, and policy makers as the premier think tank on the most critical IT issues that confront business and society. The questions for tomorrow will be different from those we have addressed so far. To be successful, CRITO must develop an innovative and consequential research agenda. To this end, I am inviting distinguished executives to join an Industry Advisory Board that will help us develop a research agenda. We also host a CIO Roundtable consisting of senior IT executives from some of the most innovative companies in Southern California who provide us with deep insights into the IT opportunities and challenges that businesses face.

I invite you to read about some of our current research. This issue of the newsletter is focused on the value of information technology. Initially, and to the surprise of many, research was unable to show that IT had positive economic impacts. Through innovative and persistent research efforts, academics at CRITO, MIT and elsewhere were able to document the significant payoffs from IT. Now that this debate has been settled, CRITO researchers have turned their attention to more focused and highly relevant questions aimed at helping firms derive benefits from IT. These include developing an understanding of how competition between firms affects their IT investments and payoffs (Vidyanand Choudhary); on how the risk of IT projects influences their returns (Sanjeev Dewan and Fei Ren), and how a firm’s governance structure (Joanna Ho and Sean Xu) affects its IT investment strategy. We preview these studies in this newsletter.

I hope you enjoy this newsletter, and I welcome you to partner with us as we embark upon the next phase of our exciting journey at CRITO.

Sincerely,