Daniel Hoffens

Rigdon, Edward, Jan-Michael Becker, Arun Rai, Christian M. Ringle, Adamantios Diamantopoulos, Elena Karahanna, Detmar Straub, and Theo K. Dijkstra “Conflating Antecedents and Formative Indicators: A Comment on A […]

The Fox School’s Department of Management Information Systems is pleased to welcome four new full-time faculty members in fall 2015. Detmar Straub is Professor and IBIT Distinguished Visiting Professor of MIS. He […]

What if there was a tool that created an educational environment that didn’t just teach but engaged students so that learning was communal—an interactive social activity, not a static one-way street of facts and […]

Temple’s AIS Student Chapter won big again at the Sixth Annual AIS Student Leadership Conference and Competition receiving first and second place. These victories mark four straight years of Temple’s clinching a […]

It came as a complete surprise to Peter Hwang to learn that he’d won the 2015 Student Leadership Award given by Fox School‘s Management Information Systems Department and Institute for Business and Information […]

When Ron Riddell graduated with a B.B.A. from Temple in 1968 computers were, he says, a “mystic temple in society.” But, armed with his degree, Riddell found himself in the computer field, and wound up, nearly 40 years later, with a successful career as a mainframe programmer. He’s currently a system support analyst and Assistant Vice President at Wells Fargo Bank.

Part of the achievement he attributes to luck, but “with out a degree at Temple I wouldn’t have gotten where I’m at…it opened doors to reasonable success.”

Now he’s helping other Temple students get their degrees, and have a chance at finding open doors, by funding the Ron and Ronda Riddell Endowed Scholarship with a $50,000 gift which is being matched by the Fox School for a total endowment of $100,000.

Munir Mandviwalla, Associate Professor and Chair, MIS, says the gift is “transformational because it will support hard working Temple students who choose business technology as a career. It is also the first such gift in the short history of the department.”

Riddell understands hard work and tight finance. He chose Temple because he could afford the tuition and live at home (commuting to class was common at the time). He got a further boost about two years into his studies. Temple became “state-related,” a designation that Pennsylvania gives universities that are independently run, but receive financial appropriations—in exchange for offering tuition discounts to students that are residents of Penn.
It was while he was at school that he met his future wife, Ronda Currens, although she didn’t attend Temple. The two met at church and she was only in Philly for a year before going home to Minneapolis. “ Four and a half years, and a lot of phone calls later,” the two married.
A job at Philco was Riddell’s first open door. After 18 months in production, he moved into programming. At the time, Philco was heavily involved in defense contracting, including work with NASA. His first computer was a Burroughs with 256 kilobytes. “I’ve got more memory sitting in my programmable alarm clock,” he points out.
The position at Philco lead to a stint at The Franklin Mint, then years of work at Combustion Engineering (a company who, at the time, was a leader in the development of both fossil and nuclear steam supply power systems.)
Then he took a job with Fidelity Bank and he’s now bee n in banking for 30 years.
“I didn’t build a better mousetrap. I got lucky getting a job in computers when demand was high.” Riddell says. He also invested, and lived a comfortable but modest life with Ronda (who succumbed to MS in 2009).
He wanted to do something that was large enough to make an impact, and the endowed fund does just that.
He also hopes that naming the scholarship after his wife, Ronda, will help people remember her. She was with him for 45 years.

Most importantly, though, “if it helps get a kid through college” then Riddell’s more than happy to have made sure doors continue to open.

What you say and how you say it may be just as important in online interactions as it is in face-to-face conversations. Especially, if you want to be thought of as a leader. Assistant Professor of MIS, Steven L. Johnson and colleagues recently analyzed the language used by members of threaded discussion boards to determine who was a leader, and who was perceived to be a leader.

The key finding? “Emergent leaders — those viewed as most influential by other participants — tend to use language differently than other participants.” Johnson says.

The research was conducted by asking members of the boards who they thought were influential. A method Johnson describes as similar to a nomination process.
After “controlling for the obvious: formal role, boundary spanning and centrality” the team came up with about 3,000 potential leaders. They then looked at the written texts posted by the 59 nominees and compared them to the 3,000.
They found that people who are thought of as leaders:

are among most frequent posters,
use positive language,
have concise posts (fewer words per post),
use simpler language (higher readability scores)
use language that is more prototypical of the community (language in their posts looks more like the typical language of all other participants).

These findings superseded whether or not the emergent leader had a formal title or position, although having one (such as administrator or moderator) did sometimes help a person get nominated.
The research was conducted by looking at all the posts in a one-year period of three online communities—all of which had a computer technology focus.
Johnson says that he was surprised, when they began the work, that there weren’t more studies done “that looked at how we wrote.”
The new findings provide, he says, empirical evidence that supports what most people in leadership theory believe. “To be a leader, you have to have good communication skills.”
S. L. Johnson, Hani Safadi, and Samer Faraj (forthcoming). “The Emergence of Online Community Leadership,” Information Systems Research.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a three-year grant totaling nearly $900,000 to trace human behaviors through big data. This marks the fourth NSF-awarded grant in the last five years that an interdisciplinary team of Temple faculty members has received to study the evolution of digital artifacts using large-scale digital trace data. The collaboration joins researchers from the Fox School’s Management Information Systems Department and College of Science and Technology (CST).

“When humans interact with digital systems, we leave a trace. Every call we make, every website we visit, it’s stamped with time and space information,” said Dr. Youngjin Yoo, the Harry A. Cochran Professor of Management Information Systems at the Fox School, and the research grant’s primary investigator. “What we do is constantly changing, and the trace data can act as DNA. What we focus on through this research is the repeat behaviors in humans that can be captured through digital trace data.
“Using those evolutionary patterns, we believe we can predict future behaviors of individuals and organizations. For example, by detecting the changes of commute patterns of individuals, we can predict overall public-transit systems’ performance in the future. Similarly, we want to be able to predict the changes in individual behaviors based on environmental changes. 

Yoo said he and the grant’s co-principal investigators will study digitally enabled processes in complex digital systems, which “are like a living ecosystem, in that they constantly evolve,” he said. If patterns in the trace data represent what they call “behavioral genes,” Yoo said, alterations to those behavioral routines are “gene mutations.” Eventually, he said, the research team envisions developing software that will better predict the changes to those behavioral genes.
The benefits in doing so, according to Yoo, “are endless.” In a healthcare application, trace data could develop a pattern by which a patient sees a doctor or produce an average cost of care per patient. In an industry sense, such “gene mutations” could impact performance and cost.
“On the surface,” Yoo said, “all smart phones, for example, look the same. But everybody’s phone is different because of apps. It used to be that the product’s designer would make the product, and that was the end of the story. Now, it’s only the beginning. Millions of apps are downloaded. They’re changing constantly.
“Our argument is that, particularly in digital space, innovation never remains the same. It constantly changes and takes different forms.”
The research team includes: Yoo; Dr. Sunil Wattal, Associate Professor of Management Information Systems at the Fox School; Dr. Zoran Obradovic, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Data Analytics at CST; and Dr. Rob Kulathinal, Assistant Professor of Biology at the College of Science and Technology.
The NSF-awarded research grant runs through Jan. 31, 2018.
– Christopher A. VitoAdd New