Student portfolio

A message from Temple MIS faculty and staff to the Class of 2021.

The MIS department was created with a focus on research. So for those who work and study here, it came as no surprise that Temple MIS faculty were the most prolific in the world in 2020 according to the Association for Information Systems’ List of High-Quality Journals, specifically MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, the Journal of Management Information Systems, and the Journal of the Association for Information Systems.

Temple faculty enjoys the distinction of having published in those four journals 14 times in 2020. Jason Thatcher, who joined the faculty last fall and holds the Milton F. Stauffer Professorship, topped the 2020 list.

“Our research productivity is a function of our excellent faculty,” says MIS chair and professor David Schuff. “We also provide an environment that strongly supports and encourages research,” he says.

Temple was also the most frequently published institution in those journals during the period from 2018 to 2020. In addition to Thatcher, four other MIS faculty appeared on the list during that period: Taha Havakhor, Detmar Straub, JaeHwuen Jung, and Anthony Vance. 

Thatcher credits the atmosphere at Temple for his remarkable achievement. “I knew I was joining Temple, and I felt like I had to measure up. Temple MIS has a really strong tradition of people doing really good things,” he says.

Thatcher, who studies how people use technology to make decisions, also points to a culture unusually friendly to doing research.  “The department recognizes the top researcher, and there are enough resources for doing research,” he says.

The breadth of subjects faculty focus on also adds to the department’s high rate of published research. “We don’t have 12 people working on the same subject,” says Schuff. Faculty members study strategy, the business value of IT, individual decision making, modeling, and more, notes Thatcher.

Another important ingredient in this formula for publication success is the MIS students themselves. “Really smart people from all over the world apply to this program. The best way of teaching people to do research is to do research with them,” Thatcher says.

When the new MIS curriculum was rolled out a year and a half ago, the department made some bold decisions. For one thing, it replaced the Systems Analysis course with a User Experience (UX) course. “UX is what today’s C-suite cares about,” says professor Munir Mandviwalla, who created and teaches the course. “Having a strong UX foundation makes our students better prepared for a more digitized economy and society,” he adds.

There are many ways of defining UX, but for Mandviwalla, who applies Donald Norman’s worldview on the subject of UX, it encompasses every aspect of a user’s interaction with a product, business, or brand. “Today you need to consider the emotional and social experience as well as the functional requirements and the steps you take to complete a task,” he says.

The course takes students through two hands-on projects. They conduct a usability analysis of an existing website they are randomly assigned and later they create a new transactional website that demonstrates their growing UX design expertise.

“The user experience has become much more crucial as the role of tech has expanded from the back office into our everyday lives. We judge an institution or business on how good the UX is,” says Mandviwalla.

In the course, he helps students learn to approach UX design from more than one point of view. “For example, the ease of use perspective suggests reducing the number of clicks it takes to complete a task. But sometimes the business model is such that you may want to add clicks to provide a better experience,” he says.

The course has helped recent MIS graduates launch their careers. “The UX Design course forced me to think about every single possible user interaction before it happened. A good design is one that is a step ahead of the user and can predict what the user will do next,” says Ahmed Hosny (BBA ’19), a software engineer at IBM. 

Justin Kish (BBA ’19) also applies the UX design skills he learned at Temple in his work as an associate product manager at Bentley Systems. “The class taught me to challenge myself creatively in ways not typically found in a coding class. By utilizing the skills I learned, I’ve been able to analyze and lead products leading to better, long-lasting UI/UX solutions,” he says.

Assistant Professor Aleksi Aaltonen is interested in how people work with data in real-world business settings. “Not just data analytics–there are a lot of people studying that. I’m interested in data as a new kind of resource for economic activity.” It’s an interest that goes back to Aaltonen’s Ph.D. thesis.

“You need to think about finding, cleaning, integrating, and interpreting the data before you can actually analyze it. We often ignore or gloss over this work,” he says. But, he stresses, if the business world wants to harness the increasingly massive data at its fingertips, someone must pay attention to these practical matters.

One of Aaltonen’s recent projects, forthcoming in the Journal of Management Information Systems, looks at a company with a new business model. “They wanted to turn a mobile network into an advertising space,” he says. People in the network would get advertisements via text message. But counting how many people receive such an ad can be a surprisingly complex thing, according to Aaltonen. After all, no one is going to buy an advertising space unless you can prove someone will pay attention to it.

“If we send a message to a person does that count as a person seeing it? Or do they need to take some other action for it to count?” he asks.

“Solving these problems is surprisingly laborious,” says Aaltonen. The flashier subjects of data analytics and artificial intelligence get more research attention, according to Aaltonen. “But answering these mundane questions is just as important when it comes to actually make use of data in a business setting.”

Aaltonen is also exploring new ways of organizing information. “I’ve studied Wikipedia a lot, and what is most fascinating is the question of how is the system managed. How did Wikipedia learn to govern the 1 billion contributions into a high-quality encyclopedia with no managers?” He thinks part of the answer lies in transparency. On Wikipedia, for example, “you can see who added, removed or changed every a comma,” notes Aaltonen.

There’s a tendency in big business to exert managerial control over everything, according to Aaltonen. “But the ultimate aim of a firm is not to control things, it’s to make a profit. And if you can make better products that people want to use, then you have to look at that,” he says. Wikipedia is probably the most used reference product in the world. “It’s a new way of creating valuable products and businesses have to stay on top of that.” 

As an undergraduate in MIS, Thomas Steigerwald (BBA ’10) took an expansive view of his future. Unlike some people who have a detailed vision of their dream job, Steigerwald knew only that he wanted to solve business problems with technology. Looking back on his years at MIS, he says his time as president of the student organization AMIS (now Temple AIS), through which he was able to connect with industry leaders, helped prepare him for what was to come. “Munir Mandviwalla is a big mentor,” he says.

After graduation Steigerwald landed a job at Aramark, which he describes as his “first taste of e-commerce.” During the year he was working there as a technical analyst another Temple alumni introduced him to Chris DiMarco, who was in the early stages of starting Lamps.com. At the time, he urgently needed his website launched.

“I knew I wanted to be solving business problems, and at that moment, I met someone who had a fun challenge,” says Steigerwald. The education Steigerwald got at Temple gave him a robust skillset that allowed him to build out the infrastructure and architecture of Lamps.com as well as leading the digital marketing strategy.

He was the first full-time hire for the start-up. “As the company has grown, I’ve grown and taken on many roles,” he says. “Everything the MIS and Fox school curriculum covered, I’ve used or applied here.” Even though he’s done it all at this point, Steigerwald has never held a formal job title at Lamps.com.

“I like not having a title,” he says. “It allows me to be flexible and add value in a variety of ways.” He can respond nimbly to the changing technology and business environment. “Ten years ago, platforms like Instagram and Pinterest weren’t around,” he points out. “You didn’t even consider building a responsive website, but as times have changed I’ve been able to quickly adapt.”

No matter which hat he is currently wearing, his work remains grounded in technology. “I can describe myself as a software engineer–I write code–but some people describe me as a solutions person because I’m finding and solving our businesses needs with technology,” notes Steigerwald.

It was a major leap of faith when he left his corporate position at Aramark to join a startup. “I saw the potential, and I was able to take the risk. And it’s been worth it,” he says.

Welcome to a new semester! Here is an update regarding the MIS Professional Achievement Program (PRO) for Spring 2021.

First, the department is reinstating the points requirement for each course. You can find the requirement for each course here and a full description of the PRO program here.

There are many opportunities to earn points. You can do almost every activity virtually, plus we have added five new activities for Spring 2021:

• Complete three LinkedIn Learning courses in these areas – professional skills, technology skills, or wellness – and earn up to 60 points per semester.
• Earn up to 25 points by completing five wellness activities, such as reading a book (for fun) and sharing a photo of a non-school related hobby.
• Earn 25 points for engaging with MIS Department social media.
• Get organized and create a calendar of your weekly routine to earn 25 points.
• Earn 25 points by adding a page to your e-portfolio with interesting facts about you.

Consult the PRO points table for details about how to fulfill the requirements of each activity.

Whether you need a plan to earn points or want advice about your e-portfolio, the MIS PRO Student Ambassadors are available to help. Your PRO Student Ambassadors for Spring 2021 are Nhi Nguyen, Connor McShane, Brianna Anderson, and Safaniya Paul. They are available via email (misdept@temple.edu) and by appointment. 

This February, the MIS Department will offer three one-hour PRO workshops. In the PRO Points Workshop, you can learn about the PRO points system, how to submit for points, and the new point categories. The E-Portfolio Workshop will show you how to make an advanced e-portfolio, get tips and tricks on making your e-portfolio stand out, and get answers to your questions about the process.

Registration is required. We will offer both workshops three times in February:

PRO Points Workshop

• Monday, February 8 at 2:30 pm (register)
• Wednesday, February 10 at 6:00 pm (register)
• Friday, February 12 at 11:00 am (register)

E-Portfolio Workshop

• Monday, February 15 at 1:00 pm (register)
• Wednesday, February 17 at 6:00 pm (register)
• Friday, February 19 at 12:00 pm (register)

Have a great semester!

Multiple sections available Spring 2021. Learn tools including Tableau and Excel.

This fall, the MIS department welcomes two new faculty members, Jason Thatcher and Leila Hosseini.

Thatcher has been awarded the Milton F. Stauffer Professorship at the Fox School. He joins MIS from the University of Alabama. However, Thatcher isn’t exactly an unfamiliar face on campus. Last year, he was a featured speaker at the Digitization 20 conference, and his informal relationship with the department dates back almost to its inception two decades ago. 

With a background in history and social science, Thatcher’s research centers on individual decision-making, strategic alignment, and workforce issues. “My interest is in studying how technology changes the world we live in,” he says. For example, he’s researched how publicly available data on social media impacts hiring decisions.

He’s been published in journals including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Journal of Applied Psychology among others and is regarded as one of the top active researchers in the field. Thatcher was recently named a TUM Ambassador by the Technical University of Munich, the highest academic honor for their faculty visitors and one of the highest academic honors in Germany.

An award-winning professor, Thatcher teaches courses in Management Information Systems and Strategic Management. His research interests cross over into the classroom. It goes beyond simply helping students understand how to manage their online presence. “All those war stories I have to resonate with. It lets them know this is a really interesting field. I love to talk to kids with an open mind,” he says.

Leila Hosseini joins as Assistant Professor after earning her Ph.D. in Management Science with a concentration in information systems from the University of Texas at Dallas. Hosseini’s research is highly practical for today’s business world. “The underlying theme of my research is to identify managerial and operational solutions to improve efficiency in technology markets, particularly cloud computing,” she says. 

“In one of my papers, we used real-world data from a mobile advertising platform and showed that a firm could save about 25 percent of their cloud computing cost by using our proposed procurement policy,” Hosseini says. Her research analyzed Amazon Web Services’ complex pricing policies to show the advantage of renting multiple virtual machines to meet a firm’s cloud computing needs.

She’s enthusiastic to work with her new students this fall. “What I really like about teaching is helping the students,” she says. “I love sharing the knowledge I have with my students to help them get a job they’re going to like.”