RateMyApartment Capstone Project
Information Systems Integration, the MIS Capstone, tasked groups of students with developing a digital solution that both solves a business problem and adds value to an organization. The group with which I worked decided to build a platform designed to improve the overall off-campus housing environment as well as help university students be more informed/aware when making housing decisions – an issue with to which our team personally related and observed to have very real, negative impacts; it was apparent that the current system posed a business problem for institutions such as Temple University, and our group felt passionately that an effective solution existed. What we came up with is RateMyApartment, a place where students can share and review valuable insight regarding the critical housing factors of individual residences/property managers – RateMyApartment’s main site can be found here.
What challenged our team the most was not project conceptualization or developing the system architecture, but instead it was being able to effectively identify and argue a business case. While we felt confident in the platform’s value-proposition, justifying an estimate of any measurable financial impact the solution might have was difficult. This is because the value that RateMyApartment offers to universities – an active effort to ensure student safety and an improvement to overall student satisfaction – is largely intangible and tricky to quantify. Even while work was well underway into the project, quantifying the business case and making it convincing remained a daunting hurdle.
After many meetings as a group and with our industry mentor, we were able to confidently assign a dollar amount describing the business value by thinking creatively. Instead of trying to argue the benefit in terms of cost savings or earned revenue, we decided to focus on the current (and continued) loss of students due to housing-related issues and the negative effects these events have on educational institutions; after bringing visibility to this observation, we demonstrated RateMyApartment’s capability in mitigating further loss of students and, ipso facto, their tuition payments. The team emphasized that if the solution worked to mitigate the loss of only one student in every four years – an extremely modest baseline – the university leasing RateMyApartment’s services will still have made financial gain while also adding a level of positive university-to-student interaction.
Below is the team’s final presentation including an appendix containing all relevant documentation.