His Lens on Life

In spring 2025, Robert Easley was awarded the 2025 Faculty Award, which recognizes a faculty member’s impactful and lasting service to the University of Notre Dame. The John W. Berry Sr. Department Chair and Professor of Information Technology, Analytics, and Operations at Mendoza College of Business was lauded for his collaborative spirit and his foresight in helping to establish the University as a leader in the fast-changing world of business analytics.

Robert Easley

For more than three decades, Easley has taught Notre Dame students how businesses can leverage technology and data to enhance their operational efficiency. But for Easley, optimization is not just an academic interest — it is a way of life.

“I drive my wife crazy with how often I comment on how traffic signals could be improved,” he said. “The lights are just not optimal, but they could be. Figuring out the most efficient way to do things is the lens I use to look at the world.”

Easley has been focusing that lens on business challenges since before he began teaching at Notre Dame. In the 1980s, he developed an automated system for creating picking lists at a warehouse where he worked. Previously, staff located items from memory. Easley helped design a software program that automatically produced an efficient route to pick the items.

The project was one of Easley’s first forays into optimizing business operations, but it would eventually become a main focus of his career. After completing his doctorate in decision information systems at Indiana University Bloomington, Easley accepted a visiting instructor position at Notre Dame in 1994, before joining the tenure track the following year.

After more than 30 years, Easley retired from the University as of June 30, 2025, and the department he’s leaving looks far different than the one that welcomed him decades ago. Much of that difference is owed to Easley’s efforts to reshape it.

Easley was the driving force behind the creation of the Department of Information Technology, Analytics, and Operations (ITAO), which launched in 2016. Not quite a decade in, the new department has been a resounding success. It has helped attract prominent researchers to Notre Dame, launched Mendoza’s Ph.D. in Analytics program and offered a business analytics major that has become the second most popular major at Mendoza.

The new department’s story started in the mid-2010s, when Easley could see that the importance of data was rapidly increasing and a sharper focus on data and analytics would help prepare Notre Dame students for the jobs of the future.

“At the time, the Department of Management included about nine different disciplines, and there were not very many other top business schools that were organized in this way,” said Easley, who served as department chair for a total of nine years.

“We had too many different disciplines together, and some of them were not very alike. Information technology, analytics and operations were in the same department as strategy and organization. The technology fields were hidden away in the much larger department, and that made it hard to convince people they should accept a job at the University. There were just so many different things going on.”

Recognizing that data and technology were playing an increasingly important role in business, Easley argued that a new, tech- and data-focused department was needed to keep pace with the technological transformation that was already well underway. It was the spark that led to the launch of ITAO.

Big data was the buzzword of the moment, and this new department capitalized on the zeitgeist. Eighty students enrolled in the very first year that the College offered the new undergraduate business analytics major. Today, more than 100 students graduate with the major each year, which makes it about the fifth largest major in the entire University.

“At the time, everyone was collecting huge amounts of data, but they were still trying to figure out what to do with it all,” Easley said. “Our friends at the consulting companies that hire many of our students were telling us this was going to be big, and we needed to train people to analyze large data sets with tools like machine learning. It was a new direction, and it turned out to be a very successful one.”

The intellectual diversity of ITAO’s faculty has played an important role in its success. Easley sought to hire faculty members who specialize in disciplines such as statistics and computer science, as well as those whose expertise is in business operations. The interdisciplinary approach has facilitated collaborations among researchers.

“To really go after this big data thing, you need to get the people that have the right skills for the job,” he said. “And part of the reason we have been able to attract top faculty is that they recognize that having a combination of researchers from all these different disciplines is a powerful thing.

“You can co-author a paper with a computer scientist or a statistician, and they really know their area of expertise in depth. Not everybody has had the same training, and everyone can bring something unique to the table. It has been a virtuous cycle. As we added more people from more disciplines, it was easier to attract even more high-caliber researchers.”

Even though the department is still relatively new, ITAO has already grappled with massive changes in the way businesses collect and use data. Machine learning algorithms have been game-changing, allowing businesses to analyze the unstructured data of the internet and make sense of the terabytes of text, images and audio that we collectively produce each day.

Generative AI is poised to change the game again by bringing virtually the entire corpus of human knowledge into play. To prepare Notre Dame students for success in this emerging era, Easley believes developing a deeper understanding of how these powerful new technologies work is paramount.

“The genie is out of the bottle,” Easley said. “There is no way we can stop students from using generative AI. That is definitely not the answer. The answer is for them to use it effectively.”

Easley noted that today’s students arrive at Mendoza better equipped than ever before, and many already have some background in coding. But in a field that is changing as rapidly as data analytics, students need to constantly learn new technologies.

“We are trying to give students an understanding of AI, so they don’t see it as a simple shortcut, but as a very capable tool that can generate huge efficiencies when used properly,” said Easley. “But proper use is key. You need to understand how to make AI do what you need, and to do that, you need to understand how it is working.”

After 31 years at the University, Easley will be leaving that task in the capable hands of his colleagues in ITAO. He knows they’ll continue to do what they’ve always done — adapt to constant change.

When Easley started at Notre Dame, the internet was only just beginning to have an impact. Since then, there have been countless changes: smart phones, big data, the platform economy, and machine learning algorithms, just to name a few. Now, the emergence of large language models such as ChatGPT is challenging businesses to reinvent themselves once more.

For Easley, even major technological changes are not something to fear.

“Our dean is fond of referencing Hokusai’s famous woodblock print of ‘The Great Wave Off Kanagawa,’ with the boats rowing into the wave,” he said. “It metaphorically represents great challenges to overcome, but I prefer to think about catching a wave and riding it, as a surfer would. My hope for ITAO is that as each new wave of technological development appears, we can maneuver well enough to catch it and ride it a while. I don’t pretend to know how challenging that will be, or what will come next, but I trust we’ll keep looking for the next big wave.”