IS Seminar Series – Writing Teaching Cases: the long and short of IT

Pratim Milton Datta is a Professor of Cybersecurity and Digital Transformation at the Ambassador Crawford College of Business at Kent State University. Pratim is also a senior research associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, and at ITU Copenhagen, Denmark. Pratim’s research focuses on how emerging technologies and global IS are deployed and implemented to solve business problems, how unfettered digital transformation can invite unwanted cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and a socio-technical IT-Portfolio design of cybersecurity. Most of Pratim’s work threads across ICT information economics. Pratim has 50 journal articles and has published in CACM, EJIS, JIT, ISJ, JAIS, IEEE, JKM, JITTC, among others. Pratim served as the PhD Director and AACSB_AoL lead and teaches EMBA, MBA, and graduate MIS and Computer Science courses. Prior to academia, Pratim worked for IBM GBS and PwC as a global CHT deployment project lead. Pratim’s pedagogical and research interests in the application of emerging technologies have recently influenced his interest in writing and publishing teaching cases. He has always enjoyed bringing his research into the classroom, only to realize that much of his academic research was, during high tide, tenuous, and, during low tide, obtuse. While the general MIS research trajectory has contributed to a plethora of acceptance research with user-psychology being the unit of analysis, students are often at a loss trying to figure out when the technology artifact would emerge from the shadows. So, Pratim started writing cases to reverse the impetus. In teaching cases, emerging technologies become the artifact and the business/culture user, the context.

In this talk, Pratim will discuss on how writing teaching cases can strike a balance between rigour, recompense, and relevance, addressing ways to engage and drive students towards innovative applications of emerging technologies in an evolving landscape.