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The Department of Management Information Systems continues to grow. I am pleased to introduce you to our two newest faculty, Anthony Vance and Aleksi Aaltonen. Dr. Vance’s expertise is in behavioral aspects of cybersecurity, and Dr. Aaltonen’s research focuses on digital innovation. We are excited to have them join our department.

Read about how we prepare our students for future success. Read about Bruce Fadem, Chair of the Fox IT Advisory Board. He discusses his role as founding Chair of the board and how that group of senior IT executives shapes our cutting-edge curriculum and provides guidance for our students.

Earlier this Fall the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) held its annual IT Career Fair, connecting over 250 student attendees with 40 companies. In November IBIT held the Sixth Annual Temple NBCUniversal Analytics Challenge. It was a great success, with over 350 students across the University competing for $12,000 in prizes.

These opportunities are a big part of what make our students successful. We profile Christian Hettinger (BBA ’18) and Danielle Buerger (BBA ’17), who are applying what they’ve learned in MIS in two very different career paths. We also profile Shahla Raei (’17), graduate of the MS in IT Auditing and Cybersecurity, who is applying what she learned to advance her career as an IT Auditor.

Associate Professor Anthony Vance said the most common cybersecurity mistake people make is password reuse. To minimize the threat of a data breach, every online account password must be unique. All that memorization? Impossible.

“If you try to remember all the passwords in your head, they’ll be weak. You shouldn’t even try,” said Vance, who has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), eye tracking and electroencephalogram to explore how to create security warnings that won’t be overlooked. “I recommend using a password manager.”

These online services require users to memorize a single strong password – Vance recommends a random string of words – and the software will manage the rest.  

“That reduces the number of passwords from dozens to just one, and that’s feasible,” he said.

Vance is one of two new professors on the faculty of the Management Information Systems Department of Temple University’s Fox School of Business. He will teach a cybersecurity elective for undergraduates while juggling research topics including how to make strong passwords easier for the brain to remember. He also serves as Director of Fox’s Center for Cybersecurity.

“At the beginning of classes, I tell students I want them to develop a sense of ‘professional paranoia,’ ” said Vance, who has Ph.Ds in Information Systems from Georgia State University, the University of Paris-Dauphine and Finland’s University of Oulu. “I want people to know what risks are out there and to make intelligent decisions about them.”

Assistant Professor Aleksi Aaltonen, whose research focuses on data-based innovations and organizing using computational methods, is also new to Fox.  He’s also a successful entrepreneur – He co-founded Moves, an activity tracking app that was purchased by Facebook in 2014.   

“I tell students that doing academic research and being a start-up entrepreneur are very similar because with both you have to cope with lots of uncertainty,” Aaltonen said. “Even if you have a great idea, it takes a lot of work to be successful whether you’re an entrepreneur or a researcher. Both also require accepting that sometimes you’ll fail.”

Aaltonen, whose Ph.D. is from the London School of Economics and Political Science, said technology is changing quickly and it’s critical that users evolve and change with it. He cited Wikipedia as an example.

“How did it learn to manage itself? Where did that come from?” he asked. “We have to remember that it’s completely different from 2001 when it started. The original intentions may not drive it today. How do they change and evolve without becoming stale and falling apart?”

Aaltonen will teach a project-based MIS 4596 course requiring students to develop a tech solution to a problem or an innovative application. It’s the final course for MIS undergraduates,  allowing them to integrate all that they’ve learned.

Aaltonen’s real world entrepreneurship means students will benefit from his experiences. He also discourages being a new technology evangelist.

“We need to teach our students to see through the hype and to pick out the technologies that are relevant for their businesses,” Aaltonen said. “Pay attention to tech but not just for the sake of tech.”

During his years overseeing information technology organizations for several large corporations, Bruce Fadem was always surprised that many new employees, even those with newly awarded degrees, were not well prepared for real-world challenges.

“Their knowledge was three to five years behind the times,” Fadem said. Temple’s Department of Management Information Systems is an exception, in part thanks to Fadem and his fellow members of the Fox IT Advisory Board. One of the board’s primary goals since coming together in 2006: helping MIS keep its curriculum contemporary.

“We’ve found a way to change the curriculum on a fairly frequent basis, which is not the norm for large universities, said Fadem, the IT Advisory Board Chairman. “Tech changes quickly and it’s become a critical component of everything we do. … It’s important that students are exposed to and understand it and know how to deal with the new technology and how it can be applied to business processes and products to help companies achieve their goals.”

Fadem, who retired as Wyeth CIO after a 20-year career, reluctantly agreed to found the advisory board, which is today composed of senior IT executives from well-known firms such as AmerisourceBergen, QVC, Pfizer, and NBCUniversal. Fadem explained he’d served on similar councils at other universities—where they used the boards to rubber stamp projects they’d already launched.

Fox’s IT Advisory Board worked differently from the start. Besides keeping curriculum current, board members and their firms engage in symposiums, student competitions, career fairs; provide insights on projects; conduct guest lectures and mentor students, as well fund scholarships and other activities.

“When I talk to students, I try to get them to understand that your career isn’t a series of well-defined steps. It’s shaped by circumstances and opportunities and you have to take advantage of them and adapt,” Fadem said. “I feel so fortunate in my professional career. I got dropped into MIS at Temple when it was still a relatively unknown unit, fast forward to today, I ended up being surrounded by very, very good people – board members, MIS faculty and staff, and students – who carried the organization and me on their shoulders to becoming one of the top MIS programs in the nation.”