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This semester, the MIS department welcomes two new faculty members, Arjan “AJ” Raven and Taha Havakhor.

Raven joins the department as Associate Professor of Management Information Systems. He comes to Temple after five years in industry, during which time he worked on projects including launching the US presence of an Italian manufacturing company as well as consulting on the many tech aspects of New York City’s famed Independent Film Festival Festival.

It’s a return to academia for Raven, who previously held faculty positions at Georgia State University and Kennesaw State University.

Raven’s teaching style is defined by his ability to see a course from a student’s point of view. “I work hard to keep lessons engaging, especially through applied work, in-class exercises,” says Raven. He might, for example, ask students to analyze how and when packages are delivered to consumers by ecommerce sites like Amazon. “I’ll ask them how technology might change this process in the next two years, and I give them time to brainstorm in small groups,” Raven explains.

These lessons can be as instructive for Raven as they are for the students themselves. “When I was away from academia, students are what I missed most. They’re often up to date on consumer trends and all the latest apps,” he says. “I learn from them!”

Taha Havakhor, Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems, comes to The Fox School from Oklahoma State University.

His research focuses on IT entrepreneurship and how small start-ups can disrupt the economy.  “Look at Uber, they’re not so small anymore, but they were. What makes them so successful? And the more pressing question—what prevents success?” Havakhor research has been published in MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research, the leading journals in the field. Some of his ongoing projects look at the role of venture capital in the tech industry, talent acquisition, cybersecurity, social media, and “big tech” in the startup world.

“Much of the past research has sought to understand established firms, but less is known about the start-ups,” Havakhor says. “Tech entrepreneurship is complicated, even more so than traditional entrepreneurship because there’s a complex layer of technology over everything else,” he says.

Havakhor relies on machine learning to help analyze the hard-to-see things that drive success, such as the degree of radicalness of a specific innovation at its inception, or the amount of passion a particular firm has for its products. “I use an algorithm that looks at a start-up’s core innovation within a network of related innovations to develop an early assessment of that core innovation’s radicalness with a 93% accuracy rate.” He hopes what he’s learning about these winning firms will help more tech start-ups realize their potential.

This semester, the MIS major introduces exciting new content to prepare students for the emerging API economy. A three-course series emphases application development and cloud software deployment, enhancing learning while building skills and confidence. “This sequence emphasizes the interconnectedness of the information. Now it’s not like three 15-week courses, it’s like a single 45-week course that goes from one semester to the next,” says professor Jeremy Shafer, who teaches both the first and third courses in the series.

The first course introduces cloud application programming and JavaScript, but it provides a more holistic view than typical JavaScript classes. This course introduces the idea that a programmer can reach into the cloud for an API and use it in the application at hand. “There’s the code you write, and then there are the resources out there in the cloud for you to bring in and leverage,” says Shafer.

The second course explores networking basics and cloud platforms. “We teach them how to build a very simple API and deploy it on the infrastructure they build,” says David Schuff, professor and chair of the MIS Department, who teaches a section of this course.

Professor Mart Doyle also teaches this second course. “But it’s in the third course that students really bring everything together,” says Doyle. “In the final course, we write an API from scratch. If you understand both halves of the process, and you can put your own API endpoint out in the cloud, there’s nothing you can’t build,” says Shafer.

One powerful shift that separates the Fox School from a typical MIS curriculum is the use of JavaScript across the sequence. “If you use a different computer language in every course, you spend a lot of instructional time just getting used to the language. By investing in one language across the three courses, we give introductory instruction once and build on it,” says Shafer.

A focus on the API economy also unifies this series. Modern businesses mix and match APIs with their own custom-coded tools to solve problems. “It’s no longer a choice between building it all from scratch or buying something out of the box,” says Schuff. Through this series, students learn the end-to-end process. “They learn the business thinking behind it,” says Schuff.

This sequence gives students a number of advantages after graduation. “Our students can have an insightful conversation about how to leverage the cloud to deploy APIs and how to design an application that scales,” says Doyle.

“Students who go through this sequence are coming away with something that will set them apart from their peers from other schools,” says Shafer. “Not everyone is being as aggressive as we are at conveying these ideas.”

This fall, the Digital Innovation in Marketing program welcomes a new chair to its advisory council. Collie Turner moves into the role after several years as a council member and serving as a capstone mentor in the program.

“I’m thrilled to help my alma mater like this,” says Turner, an alumna of what is now the Klein School at Temple University. “When I was in college in the early 90s, there was no such thing as digital,” she says. But she honed her expertise on the job, gravitating to the newly formed digital team at a now-shuttered advertising agency.

“Back then, people called me to fix the printer because they didn’t understand the difference between IT and digital,” she recalls. From there, she found her way to innovative startups that worked only in the emerging digital media, including i-frontier. “We were a bunch of 20-somethings making it all up as we went along, and it sparked an entrepreneurial spirit in me,” says Turner. 

It was colleagues on the advisory council who asked Turner to become involved in 2016. “I was so impressed by how they found people who were just the right fit. I didn’t go to Fox, but I’ve been in this field for a long while,” she says. During her career, she’s been deeply immersed both in advertising and mobile. Today she’s a senior vice president at GSW Advertising.

She’s also the founder of an ambitious new nonprofit, Heroic Gardens, which provides military veterans access to gardening services. “It’s that entrepreneurial mindset that helped me launch Heroic Gardens. It gives me a sense of pride to say I’m a woman business owner, and I’ve learned a lot that I can share with students, many of whom plan to start their own businesses after graduation,” she says.

As the new council chair, Turner’s focus is on program growth. “We’re all ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work,” she says. “We’re making personal commitments to participate in recruitment and leverage our networks.”

Now that this program is not brand new anymore, it’s time to really get the word out about a master’s degree in business that is unique and on the cutting edge of the field, according to Turner. “Our faculty are big thinkers and have so much to offer students intellectually and professionally,” Turner says. “The feedback I hear from students is that they know they’re getting a one-in-a-million education with this curriculum.” 

With Turner at the helm of the advisory council, it seems like soon everyone else will know it too.

When Ilya Rogov (MIS ’10) came to the Fox School as a freshman, he thought he’d work as a business analyst after graduation. “But my career evolved organically. Over time, I found myself writing more code and database queries, and now that’s what I do every day,” says Rogov. With nearly a decade of experience, he’s worked in several industries, including medical publishing, media distribution, and automotive distribution. His focus has been on the LAMP stack.

For the past five years, Rogov has been a web developer at Turn 14, a wholesale auto parts distributor in Horsham, Pennsylvania. “I work on a fairly small team, and we custom build most of the business’s software,” he says. Rogov helped create an app that allows warehouse workers to receive items from an automated conveyor system as well as Turn 14’s e-commerce website. “I write the code that determines the look and feel of that site, and I have a lot of freedom in what I do,” he says.

Rogov honed these skills while in the MIS program. “Our professors were great. For example, Mart Doyle always gave us real-world examples, many from his own experience, which is how I learn best,” says Rogov. He still appreciates the way Doyle and other professors put lessons in context, setting him up for success in his career.

When Urvi Patel (MIS ’06) came to Temple from her hometown of Nairobi, Kenya, in the early 2000s, she was interested in technology. With the ascent of the internet, she had a hunch that opportunities would be abundant for those with IT skills. “But I didn’t want to be a backroom program developer,” says Patel. The business world called to her. It was the blending of tech skills and industry know-how that drew her to MIS.

While still a student, she interned at Deloitte, the beginning of a long career with the firm. “Today, I’m a partner at Deloitte East Africa, in the risk advisory team where I look after our Data Analytics and Cyber, and Technology Risk (CTR) services,” she says. “Under analytics, our goal is to advise clients on how to leverage their data to harness insights, while under cyber-security, we advise clients on how to manage the various emerging cyber risks,” says Patel.

“I was recently selected to lead up our digital and innovation unit in East Africa, because of the multidisciplinary background I have. Thanks in part to the MIS curriculum, I have the right kind of well-rounded skill set to do the job,” she explains. Just as when she was a student, she benefits from a blend of core tech skills and a deep understanding of the larger business perspective.

 

Darin Bartholomew (MS ‘17) came to the MS in IT Auditing and Cyber Security program after getting his undergraduate degree in MIS at Temple. It was an easy decision because he had a high level of confidence in the curriculum. He put his undergrad degree to use working as a technical specialist at Temple while he went on to earn his master’s degree.

“As a Fox alum, I already knew the quality of education they provide,” says Bartholomew, now a project manager specializing in cyber security for the investment firm, Vanguard.

He pursued the grad program because he wanted a career change. “I had been working in a functional, IT support capacity, but I wanted to go into cyber security,” says Bartholomew. Every week it seemed another major news story broke about security breaches and hackers. As every aspect of life becomes more entwined with technology, and more and more sensitive personal data flows over the internet, the risks and consequences for businesses and individuals are increasing.

It’s a problem Bartholomew felt he could contribute to solving, with the right additional training and education. “I wanted something that felt like more than a job. In cyber security you’re protecting people’s assets, their data, and sometimes even their physical safety,” he explains, noting that hospitals and first responders can’t do their life-saving jobs in the event of a cyber-attack on the power grid. “Cybersecurity grows in importance every day,” he says.

The foundation of skills he built while in the program have helped him succeed at work. “We did many hands-on labs—it wasn’t learning technology through a book,” he says. He particularly recalls professor Wade Mackey’s ethical hacking class, which helped him learn to “think like the bad guys” and use those insights to prevent security breaches from occurring in the first place. “For me as a student that was eye-opening. It made me want to do what I do. Other professors similarly brought real-world experience into the classroom from industry across a wide range of sectors including, healthcare and government.

In his role at Vanguard, he’s achieved that goal of meaningful work. “Vanguard is all about doing what’s right for investors. I want to be part of something that has an impact, waking up every day and knowing I play a role in keeping our client’s assets safe. Vanguard’s mission aligns perfectly with what I wanted in my career,” he says.