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On April 11-13, Temple MIS hosted the 10th Annual Association for Information Systems Student Chapter Leadership Conference. Over 180 students and faculty attendees from 33 schools participated in the conference. AIS student chapter leaders and members convened in Philadelphia to exchange best practices, network with students from other chapters and engage with industry experts on cutting-edge topics. Chapter members also competed in four competition tracks in topics such as analytics, AI and blockchain.

Temple was the founding University for AIS student chapters,” says Jeremy Shafer, Temple AIS student chapter adviser. “The first conference was held at Temple in 2010, and we were excited to bring it back to Temple for the 10th anniversary.”

The conference had a full agenda, with nine workshops and panels organized and led by students in topics such as chapter leadership, women in IT, location analytics and ethical hacking. Industry leaders from AmerisourceBergen, NBCUniversal, Alexion and Capgemini spoke to the student and faculty attendees about cutting-edge information technology topics. The conference also featured two keynotes: George Llado, chief information officer and senior vice president of Alexion, and Douglas Robinson, vice president of AmerisourceBergen.

“Bringing the conference back to Temple allowed us to show what we’ve accomplished as a chapter at a national level,” says Justin Kish, MIS ’19, Temple AIS chapter president. Temple AIS Officers Vice President Cara Evans, MIS ’19, and Director of Professional Development Ami Parekh, MIS ’19,  coordinated a team of over 50 student volunteers, who greeted and guided attendees around campus.

The members of Temple AIS truly showed their dedication to the organization,” says Parekh, “The enthusiasm of our student volunteers made the conference a memorable experience for everyone.”

Matthew Nelson, executive director of AIS and Matti Rossi, past president of AIS, attended the conference. Nelson was impressed with the quality of the conference. “The quality of the competitions, the professionalism of the students and the enthusiasm and networking between students and universities is at the heart of AIS’ mission.”

“The 10th AIS Student Leadership conference demonstrated once again the liveliness of our student chapters and the health of the information systems field. AIS is very grateful for the support of Temple and the Fox School of Business and Department of Management Information Systems for organizing this year’s event,” says Rossi.

Back in 2006, JaeHwuen Jung, assistant professor of Management Information Systems, had something in his back pocket few other people had access to at the time. As an IT application architect at the largest telecom company in South Korea, he had a smartphone with unlimited data.

Almost immediately, he saw the future. “I knew this was going to change the way people shopped, did business, and lived their lives.” It changed his behavior, says Jung. For example, he became a comparison shopper, checking out the items he wanted in a bricks-and-mortar store but making the purchase online, for the lowest price.

After almost seven years in that job, what he saw inspired him to earn a Ph.D. in MIS. Today, he researches the impact of new channels and digital platforms on consumer behavior.

Jung’s paper “Love Unshackled: Identifying the Effect of Mobile App Adoption in Online Dating,” published in MIS Quarterly in March 2019, explores the impact of one such channel—mobile apps—for those in search of romantic partners. His paper shows that accessing dating apps via mobile phone results in users not only increasing their access but also getting better matches than they would have using a desktop version alone.

Why? It all has to do with the way a mobile device affects behavior. “As we rarely share our mobile phone and use it in more private places such as bathroom, it feels more private than a computer,” says Jung. So when people use a dating app on their phones, they are honest, more impulsive, and less inhibited. All these things add up to more time spent using the app and better matches.

Jung’s new research looks at how to optimize the referral program. He’s testing different referral incentive designs and learning surprising things. “If the company rewards the existing customer, there’s some guilt involved because they get something and the friend they are referring doesn’t,” he explains. But if the friend benefits, people are willing to make more referrals, and to closer friends.

In the classroom, Jung teaches data analytics to MIS majors and minors. He shows how businesses can efficiently store and retrieve data as well as how to analyze increasingly complex datasets. “Today, companies can track user locations. They know more about user behavior. With all this data comes marketing opportunities,” he says.

Clare Perretta, MS ’17, didn’t know what she wanted next in her career when she enrolled in the MS in Digital Innovation and Marketing program, but she had a hunch that the program would get her there. “I had been a writer and editor for years, but I was always drawn to marketing,” she recalls.

While she was a student, she worked full time as a communications specialist at NextGen Healthcare. Her colleagues in digital marketing turned her on to the magic of metrics, including Google Analytics. Making decisions based on data—not opinions—appealed to her, and she knew she needed more education to hone that expertise.

Professor Steven Sclarow’s Process Improvement class sparked a passion for project management. As part of that class, Perretta created a document that details every step a project goes through from idea to implementation at NextGen. After sharing it with a new NextGen vice president, the marketing department started using it as official reference material.

Another invaluable part of the program for Perretta was the network she joined. In fact, her social media instructor, Kimberly Jaindl, recently tapped Perretta to fill a new role of brand communications representative on her team at Lockheed Martin.

During the program, I learned what I want to be doing—more strategy and operations-level work—and now that’s exactly what I’m doing,” she says.

In his career before enrolling in the program, Anthony M. Pizzuto, MS ’18, had done a little bit of everything in the world of online marketing. “I worked with production teams, I’ve led creative teams, I’ve done coding and merchandising,” he says.

Pizzuto has served as the head of digital experience for Victoria’s Secret PINK brand, where he led the development of their app and oversaw user engagement. He’s also worked as the director of marketing for Prudential Financial.

What he learned in the program goes deeper than digital. “I learned to understand who the customer really is,” he says.

Since earning his degree, he has taken on a new role as head of brand marketing for Days Inn, owned by Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Now he applies the principles of user experience he learned at Temple on a larger scale, overseeing a global marketing strategy that is both online and offline, including legacy formats like billboards and radio.

“I understand now that guiding a customer through a journey is the same whether it’s in the physical world or the virtual world. And that divide is getting smaller every day,” he says.

“Technology changes every three months, but the principles I learned at Temple can always be extrapolated to the bigger picture.”

Professor Detmar Straub had eight articles published or accepted for publication over the 2018-2019 academic year. These papers cover a wide range of topics, including health IT, knowledge management, outsourcing and two-sided platforms. This research will appear in the top journals in the discipline, such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, the Journal of Management Information Systems and the Journal of the Association of Information Systems.

According to an annual analysis produced by the University of Arizona, Straub has a cumulative h-index of 70, designating him as one of the most productive and most cited researchers in the field of MIS. The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar.

A partial list of Straub’s recently published and forthcoming work is below:

• Lee, J., Park, Y., Koo, Y., & Straub, D. (in press). Holistic Archetypes of IT Outsourcing Strategy. MIS Quarterly.
• Jung, D., Kim, B.C., & Straub, D. (in press). Innovation and Policy Support for Digital Two-Sided Market Platforms: Can Government Policymakers and Executives Optimize Both Societal Value and Profits? Information Systems Research.
• Chen, L., Baird, A., & Straub, D. (in press). Fostering Participant Health Knowledge and Attitudes: An Econometric Study of a Chronic Disease-Focused Online Health Community. Journal of Management Information Systems
• Chen, L., Baird, A., & Straub, D. (in press). An Analysis of the Evolving Intellectual Structure of Health Information Systems Research within the Information Systems (IS) Discipline. Journal of the Association of Information Systems.
• Chen, L., Baird, A., & Straub, D. (2019). Why do participants continue to contribute? Evaluation of usefulness voting and commenting motivational affordances within an online knowledge community. Decision Support Systems, 118, 21-32.

Min-Seok Pang doesn’t follow sports.  “I’m a news junkie, and politics is like my sport,” said the associate professor of Management Information Systems. So back in 2013, when late-night TV hosts were mocking the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov, the website integral to the Affordable Care Act, Pang stayed on top of every headline.

From this passion for politics, a research project was born. Pang’s resulting paper, “Politics and Information Technology Investments in the U.S. Federal Government in 2003–2016,” was published in 2017 and recognized as a best publication of 2017 by the Association for Information Systems, as well as the best published paper of 2017 in the journal where it appeared, Information Systems Research.

Pang has an explanation for the paper’s warm reception: “In the business school, our focus is usually on just that: business. We don’t really look at government,” he said. But with technology becoming increasingly vital to implementing new policies, it was time to expand the boundaries of his discipline.

In his research, he analyzed 14 years of data on IT investment at the federal level. His conclusions could change the way money is spent on technology: When the government is divided, with one party in the White House while the other controls Congress, 8.3% less money is invested in new IT systems, with more spent maintaining legacy systems.

This reluctance to innovate can be countered by increased funding for new IT development when conditions are favorable. A unified government is one such condition; if an agency head has been approved by Congress that also tilts IT budgets toward new initiatives. Pang also advocates for the creation of a cabinet-level Chief Information Officer (CIO), who would have authority to direct funding toward IT development.

In the two years of unified government since Pang’s research ended, the Modernization of Government Technology (MGT) Act passed. The Act provides significant funding for investments in new technology and updating obsolete systems. “This is a drop in the bucket of what’s needed, but it’s a good start,” said Pang.

Pang’s next research project will explore how government can attract younger IT talent away from Silicon Valley. If his recommendation for a cabinet-level CIO is realized, this next generation of developers will be essential to avoid the blunders of the now-infamous Healthcare.gov rollout and implement the policy initiatives of the future.