When I was in graduate school, I remember a seminar where a professor said, “In our research, the stories we tell are really stories about ourselves.”  So, if you see the background that I’m coming from, you might be better able to “partial out” what you see as my biases and translate my ideas into your own situation.  So first, let me tell you a little about myself.

Myself and My Perspective

Please let me emphasize that I'm speaking as an IS researcher from North America.  Although my parents are from China, I was born in the United States and my education was completely American.  I studied civil engineering as an undergraduate at Cornell, where I fell in love with operations research and its applications in transportation and other public-sector problems.  I studied more operations research and also economics as a master of city planning student at Berkeley, and this put me on the path to studying behavioral research as a doctoral student in urban planning at M.I.T.  I did a great deal of computer programming when I was a student, but my introduction to the world of information systems occurred when I was on the job.  It was right after left my doctoral program, where I did systems-analysis work for the City University of New York; I was an administrator where I was a part of the budgeting process in the chancellor’s office at the university.  In that job, I saw the intersection of the technological and the behavioral – all revealing itself through the systems-analysis work I was doing.  At that time, I was more worried about doing my job than theorizing about information systems, but I retained lasting impressions about how technology mediates behavior and how behavior mediates technology.