Near the end of the dot-com boom, a new Management Information Systems department (MIS) was approved by Temple University’s board of trustees on December 14, 1999, and inaugurated during a ribbon-cutting ceremony on October 11, 2000. In less than a decade during both boom-and-bust times for information technology (IT), the department quickly established itself as a world-class powerhouse in student success, research, curriculum, entrepreneurial ventures, and industry engagement. Our successes were evident through near 100% placement, top 5 research productivity ranking by the Association for Information Systems (AIS), and in the top 15 or 20 ranking in the US News and World Report’s reputational survey for undergraduate and graduate programs; and by taking early leadership in both research and academics as areas, such as ecommerce, analytics, and data science, and digital innovation emerged. We achieved this success by attracting and developing the careers of top researchers in the field, and by evolving a dynamic and engaged faculty, student body, and staff.
In higher education, academic departments as constituted today started at the end of the 19th century when universities adopted the German model of programs with distinct research boundaries (Edwards, Citation1999). Today most universities follow the departmental model, and this is the case for MIS departments, though some are part of adjacent disciplines, such as Operations or Management. New academic units are often formed when paradigm shifts occur (Spitzer, Citation1999). At Temple University, which was established in 1884, the administration became convinced that technology would change the paradigm of all business functions, and the MIS department was created to lead this vision. Still, new academic departments inside large established universities are unusual; they rarely occur and are even more rarely talked about. In this short case, I will focus on the strategic design and orchestration of the department, while I was chair from 1999 to 2017.
The five key factors and strategies that drove our success are internal and external engagement, advocacy, storytelling, and the best athlete. These factors are discussed below in the context of a leadership approach that mixed two seemingly opposing strategies; an entrepreneurial agile startup mindset that enabled us to pivot regularly, and a slow and steady stance of deliberation and processes that coalesce over time.
Internal engagement
The first step toward success is creating and sustaining internal engagement. Just like new major initiatives in the industry require top-management support, so do academic departments because new units upset the existing balance of relationships and resource allocations. Further, since new academic units are typically created for newer areas, their value is often questioned. At Temple, top management believed in the intrinsic value of the new department. The support was very good at the start and at other times, but all in all, as the shine wore off and as we tried to fit (sometimes force fit) inside existing structures, it became more contentious and challenging. We faced the challenges by getting things done faster, cheaper, and better – the agile entrepreneurial mindset. When faster, cheaper, and better did not work, we accepted the setback rather than crying and taking our marbles home, knowing that there would be another opportunity. This is because when it did work, the rewards eventually did come – the slow and steady stance. This mixed mind-set was also the key to sustaining relationships with top management and peers, i.e., remaining engaged during both ups and downs.
We also often took the lead in engaging with other academic and administrative units, including offering secondary (a type of courtesy joint appointment) to faculty in Management, Marketing, Accounting, and Operations. This created workload pressure on faculty and staff. However, by solving problems or taking the lead in a new opportunity with and for others (e.g., providing a resource, leading joint programs, and conferences), we made friends. For example, we worked closely with the Marketing department to jointly create a new online master’s in Digital Innovation in Marketing (see Lavin & Mandviwalla, Citation2018). In this program, we shared resources, courses, and content based on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that was equitably negotiated directly between the two units.
Friends are critical in sustaining success during challenging moments. Often the benefits are more about inaction. In other words, when a partner chooses not to participate in taking away something, it can be as valuable as active collaboration. None of this means that life for a new academic unit was like eating fries every day. Some will always view newbies as threats in a zero-sum game – this is especially true during bad times and internal engagement cannot overcome all challenges. External actors are also critical to addressing challenges and generating success.
External engagement
The second and yet equally important step of creating and sustaining success is to engage externally (see Mandviwalla et al., Citation2021). This is key because in most universities success is measured by external actors. If you are valued externally, the internal actors will listen to and appreciate your work. If you show value externally, then it reinforces and validates the choices of actors who chose to internally engage while keeping the zero-sum horde waiting at the gate. Still going external is uncomfortable for some, and further increases workload pressure. We engaged extensively with our international association, the Association for Information Systems (AIS) by leading initiatives such as the establishment of student chapters and an alliance with schools across the nation to produce a biennial report on the state of the job market (see Mandviwalla et al., Citation2022). Engagement with the association established value with the academy and the exposure was also instrumental in recruiting high performing faculty. The most well-known example is “MIS Top Shelf” – an invitation only reception at an annual international conference. The engagement also reinforced the entrepreneurial start-up culture. However, engagement with the academy is only one side of the engagement coin. The second and perhaps more important form of external engagement is with industry.
Industry engagement is critical because it further validates success; it is a virtuous self-reinforcing cycle that creates internal and external externalities. As a few key marquee organizations and/or executives engage others will join, and internal engagement will accelerate and become smoother given the perceived prestige of industry engagement. Still, given the pressure on faculty to produce research and teach better, industry engagement is often seen as a nice but ultimately unattainable goal. We also quickly learned that industry engagement is only effective when seen as a long-lived relationship rather than a transaction.
To address the above, we coalesced our industry engagement strategy around forming an advisory board. The approach to build and maintain the board was slow and steady; we started with student development and networking, then added new program development, and then finally added faculty research-centered engagement. During this journey, it became natural for our industry partners to invest more and more of their time and treasure. In all, our advisory board became an excellent mechanism to sustain industry engagement (see and Mandviwalla et al., Citation2015). Advisory boards are also critical during bad times as they are invested in your success and importantly are perceived as such by internal actors. Managing advisory boards though is a significant time investment because senior executives at large firms expect to be treated as valued volunteers with which all engagements are carefully planned – the slow and steady perspectives. Over time, the board became so engaged that to sustain the pace, the nexus of activity and management was moved to a standalone university-wide institute.
Table 1. Current and selected former advisory board members.
In all, internal and external engagements set the stage to form the relationships and gain the resources needed to achieve success. However, communication – in the form of advocacy and storytelling, is necessary to realize value and sustain engagement.
Advocacy
New academic units need strong and frequent advocacy, whether they are departments, programs, centers, or colleges. Established actors will continuously question the value proposition, but this does not always come from a bad place since academics are natural skeptics. Therefore, just because a senior administrator thinks that a new unit is a good idea, it does not mean that other actors will line up in support. Advocacy thus means explaining and justifying the value, negotiating resources, and when needed carving out territory for the new unit to thrive. This process is continuous, it starts with the formation of the unit but does not end there.
Advocacy is also about strategic impatience, for the new unit to earn its place in the internal community, and to gain respect, the narrative will eventually need to switch from communicating value, to asserting the importance of rightfully earned achievements. For example, in our case, we slowly and steadily advocated the importance of becoming part of the school core programs. Over time, we added core courses in the school’s undergraduate and graduate programs. Core courses provide the means to advocate to a larger student audience, establish a visible role for the new unit, and provide resources. Advocacy is also needed because newer units lack scale, and to achieve scale, they often end up butting up against existing structures, leading to difficult negotiations. Overall, advocacy is important but can only take you so far, storytelling is an important complement to advocacy.
Storytelling
Storytelling is a positive celebratory act; it focuses on the success of individuals. Storytelling is also critical for newer units because they often lack identity, and stories establish the corpus to form an identity. Storytelling can be informal and verbal, such as telling the academy about wins in committee meetings or conferences and more structured in the form of newsletters, mailings, presentations, social media, and other communication channels. To be effective storytelling must be frequent and told in multiple channels to reach all the stakeholders – students, industry, academics, and administrators. A print annual report will be far more effective if it follows regular updates. For example, we chose to tell our story in print through postcards sent regularly to a large national audience. Postcards are both time and resource intensive. However, they are tangible, harder to ignore than an e-mail, and recipients often admire the effort involved in producing the content. Storytelling requires an entrepreneurial opportunistic mindset so that all the members of the unit participate in generating content, which in turn can balance the workload. Yet, all of this is hard to do because most of us lack storytelling skills.
In all, storytelling is one of the most important skills for academic leaders. Academia is about people, and faculty and students have stories to tell about their research, teaching, internship, field trip, class project, or new initiative. Those stories are the essential tools of engagement and advocacy. The final and most critical ingredient of success is people. Engagement, advocacy, and storytelling require people, not just team players but “best athletes” that can deliver excellence.
Best athlete
The best athletes can mean different things. For research, we defined it as faculty who are or have the potential to be the best in what they do, regardless of topic, method, or philosophy. For teaching, we defined it as faculty who can deliver relevant experiences and passion. The best athlete approach worked well; we applied the agile entrepreneurial approach to quickly select and bring in ambitious faculty, many of whom evolved into superstars (see ). Over time, this became an automatic boot strapping process in that one good hire would then attract more, and/or as hires became superstars, they would leave for greener pastures opening room for more best athletes. The success of the new hires also generated externalities for the school, attracting the best athletes in related areas. The best athlete mindset also rubbed off on doctoral students, several of whom have gone on to accomplished careers including dean, senior editor, director, and chair (see ).
Table 2. Current and selected former mis faculty, staff, and doctoral graduates.
Yet, it is hard to sustain the best athlete approach. Faculty are interested in cloning themselves; this is only natural, they are laser focused on what they need to do, need help in doing so, and at that moment in time, their world has shrunk to believing that what they are doing is the most important, and they can only keep executing if they can get more like minded and like trained individuals. This works well in the short run but is problematic in the long term. Entrepreneurial faculty leaders are able and willing to pivot to new areas as older topics become stale. However, others who bought into the prior vision may prefer the status quo. Initially, we did not handle paradigm changes well (see Spitzer, Citation1999). Best athletes also tend to have egos, which can lead to conflict. However, slowly over time, we coalesced into a more deliberative faculty hiring model that includes a shared meaning of best athlete while maintaining the focus on excellence. For other institutions, as well as at Temple, perhaps a logical evolution is to focus on impact rather than productivity, or on the new direction of the school or industry.
For students, our approach was about developing students into best athletes and moving them up the ladder of type of job and company. This approach fits the evidence that educational excellence starts at the level of an academic department (Hartnett & Centra, Citation1977). We achieved excellence by (a) being early adopters in developing courses and programs that track new industry trends and associated employment opportunities, and (b) creating a structure for motivating and measuring student development. Aligning programs and courses with industry trends was synergistic with external engagement activities (e.g., advisory board members guided curricular development), and it also created internal engagement opportunities (e.g., other units were more willing to collaborate given entities such as an advisory board with senior executives from well-known firms). Moreover, given the agile culture, we regularly pivoted toward new industry trends (e.g., creating the first university wide data science course, see Schuff, Citation2018). However, being first or near first generates new challenges. For example, teaching material and content needs to be created from scratch, and since universities are rightly conservative such programs are harder to justify, and since they are less well known, they are harder to market. Moreover, it is hard to keep bringing faculty along, a person who specializes in trend A may be unable to jump on trend B.
Still, excellent classroom content today is no longer sufficient to produce the best students. Development outside the classroom is a key differentiator when employers compare graduates across universities. We invested in creating a program that uses points to motivate undergraduate students to engage with industry, intern, impact the community, participate in clubs and competitions, and other activities, and celebrates their achievements on public portfolios (see Mandviwalla et al., Citation2013). The program was so successful that it became a software platform and spin-off company that is improving student development at other universities. Focusing on student development was synergistic with our strategy as it attracts employers, which in turn increases engagement which in turn feeds advocacy and storytelling.
Concluding thoughts
In this case, I focused on the strategies and factors for creating or renewing academic units inside a university. Others have focused on academic leadership (see Gibbs et al., Citation2008; Wolverton et al., Citation2005) and evaluation (Drew & Karpf, Citation1981). I hope that our experiences will help others achieve success in their endeavors and avoid the often-cited pitfall of becoming a barrier to change (Edwards, Citation1999; Newton, Citation2002). Even though the story presented here is about a new unit, anecdotal evidence from colleagues suggests that most if not all the above strategies are relevant for renewing a unit.
To summarize, internal and external engagement, advocacy, storytelling, and the best athlete can synergistically drive and sustain a culture of excellence that will eventually infuse every activity including research and teaching. We achieved our successes by being agile when needed and by keeping the faith and standing steady when that was needed. Most importantly, we were able to achieve success because of the accomplishments of our best athletes – the amazing students, board members, faculty, and staff I have had the privilege to work with.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Gaurav Bansal, Editor-in-Chief for the opportunity to reflect on the Temple MIS journey. This case is based on a keynote address at the Ninth Annual Midwestern Association for Information Systems Conference, May 16, 2014, at Iowa State University. Thanks to Detmar Straub and Lorne Olfman for feedback on previous versions. As they say, it takes a village … so thanks to all the best athletes listed in the tables above. Thanks to Temple faculty Steve Balsam, Sudipta Basu, Rajan Chandran, Daniel Fesenmaier, Crystal Harold, Susan Mudambi, Arvind Phatak, Jon Scott, Michael F. Smith, and Gerald Zeitz for their support. Thanks to Temple staff including Diana Breslin-Knudsen, Deborah Campbell, Julie Fesenmaier, Michael Gebhardt, David Kaiser, Brandon Lausch, Steve Nappi, Deborah Riley, Cynthia Smith, Corinne Snell, Rachel Tomlinson, and Chris Vito. Thanks to Omar El Sawy, Jane Fedorowicz, Paul Gray, Joey George, Tim Hill, Blake Ives, Sirkka Jarvenpaa, Michael Myers, Matthew Nelson, Seev Neumann, Dan Pantaleo, Matti Rossi, Vallabh Sambamurthy, Radhika Santhanam, Maung Sein, Jason Thatcher, Amrit Tiwana, Pete Tinsley, Rick Watson and my advisor Lorne Olfman for key moments of inspiration. Thanks to Bruce Fadem for founding the advisory board, and to Atish Banerjea, Sondra Barbour, Michael Bradshaw, Jonathan Brassington, Jeff Hamilton, George Llado, Niraj Patel, and Andrea Stewart for their mentorship and support. Thanks to Joe Allegra, Manoj Chacko, and Sunil Wattal – who have been at Temple almost from the start. Finally, thanks to David Schuff for taking over as chair and taking the department to the next level, and to Laurel Miller, for her major contributions from day one.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Munir Mandviwalla
Dr. Munir Mandviwalla is Professor of Management Information Systems (MIS), Milton F. Stauffer Senior Research Fellow, and Executive Director, Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT), at the Fox School of Business, Temple University. Mandviwalla applies design to improve business and society on topics such as digital transformation, broadband, social media, and IT workforce. His research has been published in top journals including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, ACM Transactions, Public Administration Review, and he has generated over $9 million in grants and sponsorships. As the founding chair of the Fox School’s MIS department till 2017, Mandviwalla led the creation of an internationally renowned academic department. He currently leads IBIT, which engages with industry on knowledge and human capital development. Mandviwalla has received awards from AIS, IBM, Microsoft, Claremont Graduate University, and Temple University. He holds a BSc from Boston University, and an MBA and PhD from Claremont Graduate University.
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