It is always a thrill to welcome back our students for the new academic year. This year, however, is particularly exciting as we celebrate the Temple MIS Department’s 20th year with a series of events to commemorate this important milestone. We began with a kickoff reception in August with alumni and faculty. The celebration will culminate with the Institute for Business and Information Technology’s 20th Annual Information Technology Awards in April 2020.

We welcome two new faculty to the department – Taha Havakhor and Arjan Raven. Dr. Havakhor’s research focuses on IT entrepreneurship and Dr. Raven brings a wealth of industry experience to the classroom. Also learn about Sunil Wattal‘s latest research in digital transformation.

Read about how new content in three of our courses prepare students for the API economy. Professors Jeremy Shafer and Mart Doyle explain how students will build an API, deploy it to the cloud, and integrate it in into a browser-based application. This will create savvy business-focused developers who understand modern application architectures. 

We also profile how three successful alumni have progressed in their careers. Read about two of our undergraduate alums, Ilya Rogov (MIS ’10) and Urvi Patel (MIS ‘06). Rogov discusses how MIS prepared him for his career as a web developer and Patel shares how she achieved success in several areas including cyber security and digital innovation. Also read about how Darin Bartholomew (MS ’17) applied what he learned in the MS in IT Auditing and Cyber Security to launch his career in cyber security.

Here’s to a great 20th year!

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.”