The Persistence Principle

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Where artificial intelligence is concerned, Sue Brown sees divergent futures. In one, humans and technology become increasingly entangled: People move about with implants, receive a universal income and no longer work. In the other, society does away with the trappings of machine-driven advances, declaring that “enough is enough.” 

But more likely, she says, is a middle path: “We figure out a way to reap the benefits from technology while also still being able to gainfully participate in society.” 

The veteran management information systems professor, who also heads the University of Arizona’s highly regarded MIS department, is direct and clear in voicing her thoughts on the future of technology, including her concerns. And she is equally forthright with regard to the prolifically productive department she leads, which she says teaches students to do one thing as their world evolves: adapt. 

'No matter what we teach today, they’re going to have to augment their knowledge going forward. And so, being adaptable, flexible and lifelong learners is really the thing.'

MIS, she says for those new to the discipline, “sits between computing and business,” with a focus on tech’s human impact. And “technology isn’t standing still,” says Brown, who holds the Stevie Eller Professorship. “No matter what we teach [students] today, they’re going to have to augment their knowledge going forward. And so, being adaptable, flexible and lifelong learners is really the thing.” 

The department, housed in the Eller College of Management, turns 50 this spring, and the success of the half-century behind it speaks well for the half-century ahead. It’s been ranked in the top five nationally by U.S. News & World Report for both graduate and undergraduate study every year since 1989 — when the rankings began — and leads the nation in external research funding among MIS programs in business schools. Back when Brown was a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota in the ’90s, UArizona’s program was the only one at the same level — which made her hiring here, in 2005, all the more exciting. 

The department, she says, has an “underlying entrepreneurial bent” that goes something like this: “If the data doesn’t exist, I’m going to figure out a way to get the data so I can do the research I want to do. If the technology doesn’t exist, I’m going to figure out how to make the technology [function].” 

Like most things of quality, MIS in Tucson started quietly and then built to something sustainable and strong. Regents Professor, department founder and MIS legend Jay Nunamaker, 86 years old and still teaching, has a lot to do with that.

The soft-spoken scholar came to Tucson in 1974, moving from the Midwest to stand up a program he wasn’t initially tabbed to helm alone. As he tells it, he got the call during the drive out to the desert from West Lafayette, Indiana, where he’d been a tenured professor of computer science and industrial administration at Purdue University. He’d packed up his car thinking he’d be the director of research, with a colleague charged to steer things administratively. But when the professor offered the administrative role backed out, then-Provost Albert Weaver dialed Nunamaker with an expanded job offer. 

“Everybody that I trusted said, ‘Don’t do it. That’ll be the end of your career. You won’t do any research,’” says Nunamaker, who holds the Soldwedel Chair in Management Information Systems. Everyone, that is, except his former graduate adviser, who told him, “Find people on campus that can help you, and build that relationship.” 

He was able to strengthen those bonds, he says, because of the credibility he’d earned at Purdue by garnering grants from the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And together, he and his colleagues raised the department up — but not without some luck. 

A case in point: In 1986, the MIS doctoral program admitted 24 applicants, guessing that about half would say yes. But everyone accepted. After “a lot of heat from the administration,” Nunamaker says, the funding necessary to bring in all 24 came through. “That was when the doctoral program took off,” he adds, not without humor. 

In ’86 and the years after, the department also welcomed a substantial number of doctoral candidates who were recipients of prestigious fellowships from the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business. “People were starting to recognize that Arizona was a special place,” Nunamaker says, citing the on-campus labs the department used as showpieces. Once they’d visited, he adds, “We never lost a top doctoral student.” 

He’s been around a while, long enough to experience successes and failures and to watch both alumni and junior faculty strengthen the program’s legacy. Nunamaker and others created the software program GroupSystems in the ’80s, in his on-campus lab, the Center for the Management of Information. The technology, he says, let employees talk to each other without being in the same room — like Zoom, “only it was 20 years before Zoom.” Today, he sees the product as too complex on its face and ahead of its time, maybe too far. 

Within the department, Nunamaker is seen as the well from which so much else has sprung. Regents Professor Hsinchun Chen, who started up the Artificial Intelligence Lab when he arrived at UArizona in 1989 — still the only AI lab in a business school — says Nunamaker “took a chance on me.” 

“I came in … unknown to him at all. At the time, I’m doing AI, but nobody knows AI,” says Chen, who holds the Thomas R. Brown Chair in Management and Technology. “Jay is always instrumental in trailblazing his own path,” he says, describing Nunamaker as one of the two or three foundational thinkers in the field. 

These days, Nunamaker is working with his very last doctoral student after mentoring more than 100 of them. And the department, with Brown’s guidance, keeps moving. The program recently inaugurated a master’s degree in cybersecurity, she notes, and Nunamaker says that remnants of the early days linger. In the beginning, for example, founding faculty members Jim LaSalle and Wayne Eirich taught a popular information systems class in Centennial Hall, Eirich dressing up in, say, a white lab coat for topics in the sciences — part entertainer, Nunamaker recalls, and part disciplinarian. (The course’s early 2,000- plus enrollments, he notes, generated the funds for the department to hire additional research faculty.) Today, Bill Neumann teaches the course, wearing a different tie to every lecture, patterned every way one might imagine. 

And Chen sees the department playing a significant role in AI in the 50 years to come, despite the financial constraints of the present moment. He echoes Nunamaker, whose guidance to first-semester doctoral students includes “the persistence principle”: “Never quit; keep trying; keep exploring; overcome obstacles. There is no finish line.” 

“The direction is clear: I think we are in the driver’s seat,” Chen says. “We can make [an] impact on AI from the business school perspective. But we just have to get enough resources; we have to train our students. We’re teaching the right content. And they’re going to march out to be good professors elsewhere. They are going to go out to the best companies out there — Amazon, Tesla and so on.” 

As the world spins, then, they’ll make it a bit brighter — like technology, never standing still.