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Megan Hall (MS ‘21) had a lightbulb moment about five years ago when she was Director of Internal Audit at Simmons Bank in Arkansas. “I started to see how everything we do in banking is dependent on technology,” says Hall, who had also worked as a National Bank Examiner. “I was extremely familiar with banking, but I felt like I needed a better understanding of the technology and the risks around it.”

That’s when Hall received an email about the Temple master’s degree in information technology auditing and cyber security. “Immediately I was like, ‘this is exactly what I want to do,’” says Hall.

Hall was in excellent company at Temple as she completed her masters while working full-time. “Most of our professors were working day jobs, too,” she said. “It was a really good balance of textbook education and real-world experience. That was probably the most valuable thing—the breadth and depth of knowledge that different instructors had,” said Hall.

When she was about a year into the MS program, Hall’s decision paid off with a promising job offer from First National Bank of Paragould, overseeing cybersecurity, day-to-day tech support, and automation and innovation. “They saw that I was working on my degree, and they found that to be very valuable,” says Hall. “So I was able to go from the director level to CIO because of my degree.”

After Vanessa Marin (MS ‘21) earned her undergraduate degree in MIS at Temple, she searched for a program that would get her a management-level position. After speaking with several professors in the program, she opted for the full-time, 11-month master’s degree in information technology auditing and cyber security.

Marin’s instincts proved correct. “Before the end of my masters, I had already acquired a Cyber Assurance Advisor position with Comcast,” says Marin. There she conducts assessments of the company’s security landscape. “We essentially touch every single business unit at Comcast, so it’s wonderful exposure across the organization.”

Marin found both the coursework and the relationships at Temple to be extremely valuable. “The material is 100% relevant. It was all just very well laid out and organized,” says Marin. “And I was able to reach out to some of my professors when I was considering job offers to get advice on not just salary, but career development.”

Most nonprofits don’t have the budget to hire in-house technology specialists, or the budget to hire pricey consultants. A group of Temple MIS students is stepping up to fill this need—streamlining processes for local organizations while gaining invaluable real-world experience.

Founded in fall 2019, Optimize Consulting Group (OCG) is under the umbrella of Temple Association for Information Systems (AIS). Run by Connor McShane, Ariella Izbinsky, and Brianna Anderson, the team kicked off with its first pro bono client in spring 2020. Since then, it’s helped several Philadelphia area nonprofits in areas like UX redesign, Google Analytics integration, and data analysis.

Most OCG projects have a multifaceted approach, intended to make each nonprofit run better as a whole to meet its goals. OCG’s mission prioritizes client relationships and finding custom solutions to the most pressing problems.

Students typically partner with clients in teams, on a 5-month semester timeline. “This semester, we happen to have two UX redesign projects,” says McShane, OCG’s principal. “It’s been a wonderful opportunity for our two student teams to collaborate and assist each other.”

Like many MIS professionals across industries, the students have found scope creep to be a challenge. “More than anything, we want to help our clients with whatever they desire, but in order to stay on track we have to stay within the scope of the project,” says McShane.

Having the privilege to help clients make a bigger impact is incredibly rewarding for the team. “Being a part of a group that helps amazing causes in our community is the best part,” says McShane. For example, the OCG website redesign for The Monkey & The Elephant, an organization that supports young adults transitioning out of foster care in Philadelphia, focused on increasing revenue. The new design highlighted catering services and garden space rental, and streamlined access to the group’s online store.

OCG clients appreciate the students’ hard work. Amy Cohen partnered with OCG in 2020 to revamp the donor management system for Friends of Sueños, her Wynnewood-based nonprofit, “I have already recommended OCG to a nonprofit whose board I recently joined,” says Cohen. “The knowledge, professionalism, and enthusiasm of the OCG team was truly impressive.” 

OCG’s goals include extending its reach so that all area nonprofits are aware of its services. “The future of OCG is extremely bright,” says McShane. “Not only are we continually developing our processes to best serve the client, but we are shaping students’ professional development. I feel confident that our team could solve any problem that a nonprofit organization might bring to us.”

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

The Temple University Student Chapter of the Association for Information Systems (Temple AIS) has won Student Chapter of the Year for the 2019-2020 academic year. The Student Chapter of the Year Award is the highest award given to an AIS chapter. According to the AIS Student Chapter website, it is given to a chapter “that has demonstrated an exceptional, well-rounded, and organized program.”

“We are truly honored to receive this award on behalf of this year’s and last year’s leadership team,” said Kevin Publicover, senior MIS major and president of Temple AIS. “Keeping our members engaged was a big challenge during the pandemic, but we were able to successfully pivot online last Spring and keep our organization going this year.”

“I’m proud of what Temple AIS’ leadership has been able to accomplish during a difficult year,” said Steven Sclarow, assistant professor of MIS and faculty advisor for the student chapter, “This award reflects the hard work of the entire team.”

Temple AIS has many activities that provide their members professional development opportunities that also serve the broader community. Notable initiatives include creating a coding club for middle school students at the Tanner Duckrey School in North Philadelphia and launching the Optimize Consulting Group, which provides pro-bono technology services to non-profits.

Student Chapter of the Year is the highest honor Temple AIS has received since 2015 when they won Distinguished Student Chapter, the second-highest honor for a student chapter. Temple AIS previously won Student Chapter of the Year in 2013.

The organization will be recognized at the virtual 2021 AIS Student Chapter Leadership Conference on April 9 and 10. More information can be found on the AIS Student Chapter website.

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.”