Rima Fayyad: E-Commerce Scholar Joins OSB

Professor Rima Fayyad

Professor Rima Fayyad, the new
e-commerce scholar who joined the Olayan School of Business in fall 2006, earned her bachelor's degree in business administration from AUB at a time when no specific track in the business program existed. For seven years, while working at the AUB Comptroller's Office, she diligently pursued her graduate studies at the Lebanese American University. She then shifted to work in the internal audit department of Lebanon's Central Bank, where she also completed her master's in business administration in 1997. Almost immediately thereafter, she traveled to the United States to work on her doctoral studies at the Utah State University, where five challenging years elapsed before she completed her PhD in business information systems.

Generally interested in technology adaptation and diffusion, Fayyad says that her research at Utah largely centered on the extension of the technological acceptance model to electronic commerce. She speaks enthusiastically about the American students she worked with as a teaching assistant, lauding their remarkable drive to improve their living conditions and ascend the social ladder by pursuing higher education. Over a period of three years, Fayyad taught a large variety of students of different classes and backgrounds, including firefighters and agricultural machine mechanics, united by the hope of social mobility. "I became increasingly sensitized to the importance of my role as a potential agent of change for those people," says Fayyad, who in retrospect feels that the usually privileged status of AUB students sometimes works to dilute their drive for academic achievement.

Apart from her current research on technology implementation, adaptation, and diffusion in one large financial corporation in Lebanon, Fayyad is also teaching one undergraduate class entitled Business Data Analysis, a class that many business majors find difficult and thus tend to defer to their senior year. In the fall term, Fayyad introduced some innovations to the course to make its content more viable in terms of teaching students how to apply technical formulas in mundane business life.

When Fayyad is not immersed in academia or researching ways to develop electronic commerce in Lebanon, she engages in social welfare and volunteer work. Her remaining leisure time is devoted to watching movies, reading, and especially attending concerts and indulging in the music of her favorite bands and singers, including Simon and Garfunkle, Andrea Bocelli, and Eric Clapton.