Ten Questions for Manju Ahuja

Manju Ahuja, Frasier Family Chair of Information Systems at the University of Louisville, earned her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. She previously held faculty positions at Indiana, Florida State, and Penn State. Her research explores technology-enabled collaboration, the Future of Work, IT’s impact on work-life balance, and women’s participation in STEM. An AIS Fellow since 2021, she received the Academy of Management OCIS division’s Lifelong Service Award in 2020. She has served as Senior Editor for MISQ, ISR, and JAIS, and held visiting appointments at top institutions worldwide. Her work has been cited by major outlets like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, and Times of India.

A pioneer in gender and IT research, she co-led two major NSF grants to enhance inclusivity in STEM. She currently serves on the leadership team for a $1M NSF ADVANCE grant to improve advancement structures for women in STEM at her university.

1. You have a long history of service with AIS in various leadership roles and most recently as VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Could you share a bit about your various volunteer positions and how they have changed over the years with AIS?

I have been associated with AIS since its inception 30 years ago. I was a fourth-year doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh when a group of scholars, led by Bill King, started AIS. My advisor, Dennis Galletta, was the conference chair for the first AIS conference in Pittsburgh. So, I did whatever I was asked to do, starting with serving as the AIS proceedings editor. Over the years, I have done a range of AIS service, including Program Committee work, and serving as placement chair,  publicity chair, as well as junior faculty and mid-career consortia chair. At this stage of my career, I must be selective in what service roles I agree to. In discerning this, I am typically drawn to positions that privilege mentoring and promoting equity. 

So, I feel a deep connection with AIS and how it has grown. In a sense, I feel like I have grown up with AIS and my career is as old as AIS. 

2. What are some initiatives you have created as the VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that you are most proud of?

Actually, I am approaching this from multiple directions. We now have a passionate and committed DEI team that is ensuring equity, fairness, and transparency in award nominations and selections, promoting conference attendance from lower HDI countries by providing financial assistance, and consolidating and unifying DEI statements across AIS chapters and committees. We are also working to raise awareness of these DEI efforts so that our members know we take this seriously and so they understand how to take advantage of these initiatives. To this end, we have created a dedicated section to DEI on the AIS website and will be producing newsletters and videos.

3. Can you talk about some of your efforts to improve the participation of women in STEM areas?

Early in my career, I wrote one of the first research agenda articles on the subject of Women in the IT profession that continues to spawn new research. This paper identified social and structural barriers to women that impede their entry, retention, and advancement in the IT workforce.

During 2019-2023 a team of us at University of Louisville received a $1 million NSF institutional transformation ADVANCE grant to improve equity for STEM faculty. We created structures that will address implicit bias, recruitment and retention, mentoring programs for improving opportunities for mid-career promotion and support the career progress of faculty going through major life events. With this grant, we created the ATHENA Center for STEM Equity which will enhance the university’s institutional capacity in STEM equity research. 

When I worked at Indiana University, we received an NSF to study many computing programs, with the goal of learning how to promote women’s participation in IT/IS programs. And as a part of the DEI VP work at AIS, we are working on institutionalizing some of the recommendations that came out of the IMPACT grant that focused on supporting women and under-represented groups in advancing to the rank of full professor worldwide. We are now working to institutionalize measures aimed at reducing unintended structural and process bias.

4. What has been the most rewarding part of your time as an AIS volunteer? Are there any programs or initiatives that stand out that you were especially proud to be involved in?

What I am most proud of is the mentoring of junior colleagues informally and through the various consortia. It is really wonderful to watch colleagues grow and develop over the years. 

5. What is your favorite memory at an AIS event (ICIS/AMCIS) or affiliated conference (ECIS/PAIS/etc.)?

It would have to be the very first AIS conference in Pittsburgh that I referred to above. There was such excitement in the air about the start of something new for the field, and I feel exceedingly proud to have been a part of that moment. Of course, we had no idea at that time how it would turn out. Looking back, I feel nothing but happiness and gratitude for how the discipline has developed and matured in the years since!

6. You recently wrote an opinion paper titled “So what if ChatGPT wrote it?” Multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges and implications of generative conversational AI for research, practice and policy” where you joined forces with experts in 40+ other fields of study. What was that experience like for you and how could IS do more for cross-studies such as this one?

For me personally, it was not too different from writing an independent piece because I was asked to comment on a specific aspect of ChatGPT use. It takes someone with a vision for such an article, who can coordinate such efforts with a large number of scholars weighing in from different perspectives, which is what happened here.  

7. What are some challenges you faced when doing a paper with such a wide variety of experts?

Making sure that that the contribution of each perspective comes through without much overlap in content can be challenging. With any emergent issues, there are often a small number of ways of looking at it and many people may have similar views. Integrating them into one coherent piece can be tricky.

8. What do you think the next big area of focus will be for IS? How can AIS support it?

Education and institutional policies are changing due to a variety of factors such as AI, declining support from state agencies, and declining enrollments domestically as well as internationally.  As IS educators and researchers, we can help have a role in helping institutions navigate this uncertain landscape. One specific contemporary issue that AIS can have an impact on is how education may evolve because of GenAI. AIS can create groups related to these topics that lead the thinking, strategies, and their implementation. 

9. What are some of the most important research areas with the potential for lasting global impact that IS researchers should focus on more?

Future of work is a particularly important area from so many important perspectives. Managing remote and hybrid workforce and teams using technology is an important challenge to solve. We need to question the always-on nature of the work that technology promotes. We should explore practices of IT use that can improve the quality of life.  Additionally, we need to study ways of improving participation in the IT workforce from under-utilized segments of the society, such as countries from the Global South or demographic or demographic segments. 

Importantly, we are starting to look at how IT can promote social good. We should accelerate these efforts to systematically tackle social issues across the globe. We also need to look at ways of minimizing how IT contributes to social harms, such as the massive carbon footprint of AI, or biased algorithms, for instance.

10. What is the one trend you are most excited about for the future of IS?

Personally, I am very excited about the efforts to promote participation of the Global South in AIS global conferences. This is one of the many ways we can rectify historical patterns of exclusion, and strengthen our field for all.